ID perps on common descent

[RonO]

Behe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe

QUOTE:
Unlike William A. Dembski[26] and others in the intelligent design
movement, Behe accepts the common descent of species,[27] including that
humans descended from other primates, although he states that common
descent does not by itself explain the differences between species. He
also accepts the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth and the
age of the Universe. In his own words:
END QUOTE:

http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_dm11496.htm

QUOTE from 1997:
I want to be explicit about what I am, and am not, questioning. The word
"evolution" carries many associations. Usually it means common descent
-- the idea that all organisms living and dead are related by common
ancestry. I have no quarrel with the idea of common descent, and
continue to think it explains similarities among species. By itself,
however, common descent doesn't explain the vast differences among species.
END QUOTE:

Behe also made similar statements in responses to his critics at the
turn of the century. He used it as a defense to critical comments that
Irreducible Complexity was being used as the usual creationist
anti-evoluion junk. Behe claimed that he was not anti-evolution so
those associations could not be made. The scientific creationists had
their "the flagellum is a designed machine" argument long before Behe
claimed IC meant designed. Black Box was publilshed in 1995 and IC
never became any more than the flagellum is a designed machine claims of
the scientific creationists. Behe claims that he can test the notion,
but he has never attempted any testing. IC never progressed past the
untestable claims.

Denton:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Denton

QUOTE:
He describes himself as an evolutionist and he has rejected biblical
creationism.[7]
END QUOTE:

Denton has the Deistic belief that his intelligent designer got the ball
rolling with the Big Bang and it all unfolded into what we see today.
Nothing that we can discover about nature would go against Denton's
belief, but the vast majority of IDiots don't want to believe it, and it
isn't close to being a testable scientific hypothesis.

I put this up because Glenn has indicated that he never understood that
Behe was not anti-evolution. The level of denial that it takes to
remain so willfully ignorant for decades would seem to be unbelievable,
but that doesn't mean that the IDiots that are left are not that badly off.

Most of the ID perps are anti-evolution creationists.

Dembski was mentioned as being anti-evolution in one of the quotes above.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Dembski

QUOTE:
Dembski holds that his knowledge of statistics and his skepticism
concerning evolutionary theory led him to believe that the extraordinary
diversity of life was statistically unlikely to have been produced by
natural selection.[10]
END QUOTE:

Reference 10 link is dead, but no one should doubt that Dembski is
anti-evolution.

Dembski recently came back to IDiocy after claiming to have moved on
several years ago. He just couldn't make an honest living, so IDiocy is
stuck with him. None of old Dembski junk made the ID Perp Top Six, so
there was no reason for his return.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/a2K79skPGXI/m/uDwx0i-_BAAJ

There probably isn't any doubt that Meyer, Kenyon, Thaxton, Wells and
Nelson (among the group that I recall as original ID perps at the
Discovery Institute) are anti-evolution. Berlinski doesn't seem to be
any more of an agnostic than Denton, and his love of the old scientific
creationist anti-evolution junk would seem to make him anti-evolution.
I don't recall Berlinski putting up anything except arguments that had
already been well used by the scientific creationists. He has claimed
to have never bought into the intelligent design claptrap, so he may
just be a contrarian. Minnich is likely anti-evolution, but he doesn't
make a big deal about it.

Except for a couple of ID perps it does look like the intelligent design
creationist scam is just a name change for the old scientific
creationist ploy. Both groups claimed to want to do the science to
support their religious beliefs, but no science ever got done, and both
groups ended up with the same god-of-the-gaps denial stupidity that the
ID perps put up as their Top Six nearly 4 years ago. The difference
seems to be that IDiocy turned into the creationist bait and switch scam
that creationists are running on themselves, and scientific creationism
has pretty much faded into the nothing that it always was.

My take is that scientific creationism could make a comeback. There
hasn't been any creationist rubes stupid enough to want to teach ID
since 2017. This is likely the longest stretch between bait and switch
scam instances since the bait and switch started in 2002. No IDiot
rubes ever get any ID science. All the rubes get is an obfuscation
switch scam that the ID perps claim has nothing to do with IDiocy. Even
though the ID perps keep updating their teach ID scam propaganda, it
seems to be difficult to find rubes stupid enough to try to teach the
junk at this late date in the bait and switch scam. So what is the next
creationist ploy going to be? IDiots with similar beliefs as Behe have
suggested "evolutionary creation", but most IDiots are anti-evolution
creationists and have no interest in teaching their kids evolutionary
creationism.

ID scam Teach ID pamphlet:
https://www.discovery.org/m/securepdfs/2021/03/Educators-Briefing-Packet-Condensed-Web.pdf

The ID perps keep updating this junk every 3 years or so, but they still
have their old education policy in it claiming to have a scientific
theory of ID to teach in the public schools and the original junk
claiming that the Dover decision was wrong and ID is science and can
still be taught in the public schools. They have added some things
besides updating the pictures from time to time, but a lot of the old
junk is unchanged since it was first published after Dover.

One thing that IDiots should figure out for themselves is that the other
ID perps that claim to have been influenced by Denton (Theory in crisis)
and Behe (Black box) were obviously misled in terms of their
anti-evolution beliefs. Just like Glenn they refuse to understand what
the situation actually is and was at the time.

It hasn't helped that Behe and Denton have relied on the
misunderstanding to keep selling their books. Really, if Behe were ever
able to confirm that the flagellum was IC he would be telling the IDiot
rubes what the designer did over a billion years ago with the then
existing parts to make them work together as a flagellum. Behe would
know where the parts came from and what changes were made by his
designer at that time to make the flagellum work. How many IDiots would
be interested in such ground breaking scientific verification of Behe's
IC? The obvious answer is likely the reason why Behe has never
attempted any verification. Denton's and Behe's junk has only been used
for denial purposes by IDiots. It shouldn't be any surprise to IDiots,
that this is the case because Denton and Behe have only used their junk
for denial purposes. Has either one of them ever tried to construct
some type of positive theory for IDiocy? Denton has an alternative, but
it isn't based on anything except denial, and the vast majority of
IDiots don't like Denton's alternative.

Ron Okimoto

[jillery]

I can't take seriously Behe's claim that he accepts evolution and/or
common descent, when he has devoted so much of his career promoting
Devolution and the evolutionary impossibility of IC. Perhaps it's
just me.




--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Glenn]

No, many others are just as dishonest. Behe accepts limited Darwinian evolution, and would probably consider IC to be impossible for Darwinian evolution. Since Behe makes clear he believes that an Intelligent Designer has at times in history made changes to organisms, only the foolish would claim that he accepts "common descent" as unguided evolution/natural selection all the way back to first life.

[RonO]

He calls the evolution that his designer doesn't have to be involved
with devolution, but it is still evolution. Whales evolving from land
animals is devolution to Behe, but it is still whales evolving from land
animals.

Ron Okimoto

[Glenn]

But you won't actually support that with facts.

[jillery]

You and I agree that what Behe et al call Devolution is stiill
evolution, but they don't:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaHKqOCT3IM>
***********************************
[Darwin Devolves will] show that not only is Darwin's
mechanism incapable of building complex structures that was doubted
ever since he first proposed his theory, but it also shows that
darwin's mechanism actively degrades complex structures and that in
many circumstances that's helpful to an organism so it helps a species
survive but it can't explain where the elegant complexity of life came
from.
************************************

[Burkhard]

Interesting question (or maybe ultimately not, might be ultimately
semantics) But would you say that animals like GloFish or the Oncomouse
still part of the tree of life, with common descent? Their genes could
not (I think) be explained through evolution alone, unless we massively
change what we think is possible in terms of horizontal transfer.

I'd say post sides could be argued, and those who think that as long as
it merely fiddling with/changing an existing species, these do not
constitute counterexamples to common descent, and that would allow
potentially Behe to claim the same. Those who don't would have to argue
that already now, ucd is false as stated, And then of course one could
have positions in between, where it would depend on the degree of
manipulation;

[RonO]

Didn't you lie about this once before and I put up Behe's whale claims?
Why do I need to do it again, if you are just going to keep lying
about it?

You can demonstrate that I am wrong, but you can't because you can just
Google "Behe AND whale devolution" and get multiple hits about Behe's
claims from 2019. There are even a couple of Discovery Instute videos
on it.

Before I gave you the articles that they had put up at the Discovery
Institute web site.

I do not know why you have to lie about these things.

Willful ignorance is stupidly dishonest. Just think how willfully
ignorant you had to be to not know what Behe believed about common
descent for decades.

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

This doesn't deny biological evolution. It just claims that some
evolution involves changes in complex structures, which they claim is
not building something when you degenerate a limb into a fin. You have
to knock out some genes that are used to make the limb, but where does
the extra tissue come from to make the fin?

Behe doesn't deny that whales had an ancestor with 4 legs. He just
thinks that his designer didn't have to be involved in whale evolution.
It could have happened when the designer wasn't looking. The Designer
had to be there over a billion years ago to design the flagellum, but
Behe hasn't found anything for the designer to have done for the last
half billion years so he has even claimed that the designer could be
dead. TO regulars should recall that fiasco. Whales might have evolved
by devolution because the designer no longer exists.

Ron Okimoto

[jillery]

Phrases like "incapable of building complex structures" and "can't
explain where the elegant complexity of life came from" unambiguously
deny biological evolution. The fundamental point of the Devolution
argument is that biological evolution is fundamentally incapable of
originating "new" information, where "new" is whatever feature
somebody imagines is too complex to explain.

> It just claims that some
>evolution involves changes in complex structures, which they claim is
>not building something when you degenerate a limb into a fin. You have
>to knock out some genes that are used to make the limb, but where does
>the extra tissue come from to make the fin?
>
>Behe doesn't deny that whales had an ancestor with 4 legs. He just
>thinks that his designer didn't have to be involved in whale evolution.
> It could have happened when the designer wasn't looking. The Designer
>had to be there over a billion years ago to design the flagellum, but
>Behe hasn't found anything for the designer to have done for the last
>half billion years so he has even claimed that the designer could be
>dead. TO regulars should recall that fiasco. Whales might have evolved
>by devolution because the designer no longer exists.
>
>Ron Okimoto

I find nothing online which quotes Behe saying anything substantial
about whale evolution. Discotut has articles and videos about whale
evolution which don't quote Behe, and they have articles and videos
which quote Behe but not about whale evolution.
Will you cite these sources to which you refer?

[jillery]

On Sun, 5 Sep 2021 22:13:44 +0100, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
wrote:

It's unclear what you think your examples illustrate. Both Glofish
and oncomice are unambiguously intelligently designed organisms... by
humans. Their design and development are well documented. ISTM in
order for your examples to be relevant to this discussion, you would
have to provide plausible evidence of intelligent designed organisms
by non-humans.

OTOH a counter-example to your examples would be eukaryotes, the
domain almost certainly resulting from the chimeric symbiogenesis of
different prokaryotic lineages. Over time, the genetic transfer of
mitochondria genes and host genes has become so intimate, that the
incompatibility of different mitochondrial lineages is a primary cause
of biological isolation between populations.

Eukaryotes first appear in the fossil record almost 2 bya, and so
definitely *not* designed by humans. However, the existence of
eukaryotes is not by itself evidence they are the result of non-human
intelligent design. Part of the evidence for symbiogenesis is the
separate genetic histories of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA, and
mitochondria's homologies to extant Rickettsiales, which are evidence
for the more likely explanation, of a rare but still entirely natural
incomplete phagocytosis.

>I'd say post sides could be argued, and those who think that as long as
>it merely fiddling with/changing an existing species, these do not
>constitute counterexamples to common descent, and that would allow
>potentially Behe to claim the same. Those who don't would have to argue
>that already now, ucd is false as stated, And then of course one could
>have positions in between, where it would depend on the degree of
>manipulation;

I assume your "post sides" is a perverse mutation of "both sides" from
autocorrect. If so, it's still unclear what you think are the two
sides.

If the Devolution argument claimed "merely fiddling with/changing
existing species", it wouldn't be an anti-evolution argument at all.
After all, mutation and natural selection does that as well. Instead,
Devolution is an extension of the line of reasoning that accepts
micro-evolution but not macro-evolution, that the extent of novel
change and new features are too improbable to have evolved by unguided
natural processes.

Behe et al argue that evolution is *incapable* of explaining the
origin of novel features. IMNSHO that's substantially different and
stronger than merely fiddling with changes.

[Glenn]

Why do you care? You make up shit about others all the time.

[Burkhard]

I don't think that for my question the designer matters. The question is
solely about the boundaries of the term "common descent". Part of your
question was how Behe can reconcile his advocacy of ID with accepting
CD. That seems to be possible if and only if one argues that artificial
modification of DNA of some organisms during the evolutionary chain - by
whomsoever - does not negate CD. So to probe the consistency of his
position, I grant for the sake of the argument that some intentional
interference took place, as he argued, and ask if under these condition
we would still speak of CD. If not, then as you suggest his position is
inconsistent. And the test case for me would indeed be organisms hat we
know were manipulated 9by us) - do we still say they and their
descendants share common ancestry with us

>
> OTOH a counter-example to your examples would be eukaryotes, the
> domain almost certainly resulting from the chimeric symbiogenesis of
> different prokaryotic lineages. Over time, the genetic transfer of
> mitochondria genes and host genes has become so intimate, that the
> incompatibility of different mitochondrial lineages is a primary cause
> of biological isolation between populations.
>
> Eukaryotes first appear in the fossil record almost 2 bya, and so
> definitely *not* designed by humans. However, the existence of
> eukaryotes is not by itself evidence they are the result of non-human
> intelligent design. Part of the evidence for symbiogenesis is the
> separate genetic histories of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA, and
> mitochondria's homologies to extant Rickettsiales, which are evidence
> for the more likely explanation, of a rare but still entirely natural
> incomplete phagocytosis.
>

all true, but that is all about the question if ID happened and what
would count as evidence for it. For the purpose of this argument, I
grant that point, and ask what it would entail for CD

>
>> I'd say post sides could be argued, and those who think that as long as
>> it merely fiddling with/changing an existing species, these do not
>> constitute counterexamples to common descent, and that would allow
>> potentially Behe to claim the same. Those who don't would have to argue
>> that already now, ucd is false as stated, And then of course one could
>> have positions in between, where it would depend on the degree of
>> manipulation;
>
>
> I assume your "post sides" is a perverse mutation of "both sides" from
> autocorrect. If so, it's still unclear what you think are the two
> sides.

Yes indeed, autocorecct at it again. And the two sides are in the
Glofish example arguing that glofish still share CD with all other life
forms (because we did not create them de nove)vs they do not because of
their designed features.

I would tend to the former, and treat it as analogous to artificial
selection for NS, but I could see how others might want to put them in a
different box - and as I said, the degree of interference, and how much
naturally occurring DNA was reused may also matter. As far as Behe is
concerned, it then comes down to consistency: someone who also considers
Glofish to not any longer common descent with other organisms should
also argue that Behe's position is incompatible with CD

[RonO]

Behe only claims those types of structures, if they exist, would create
a problem for what he calls Darwinian evolution. They don't cause a
problem for his type of evolution. Miller is a theistic evolutionist
and probably thinks the same way when he considered his God to be able
to jiggle atoms to make things come out the way that God wanted. Miller
just doesn't claim that his belief is scientific.

>
>
>> It just claims that some
>> evolution involves changes in complex structures, which they claim is
>> not building something when you degenerate a limb into a fin. You have
>> to knock out some genes that are used to make the limb, but where does
>> the extra tissue come from to make the fin?
>>
>> Behe doesn't deny that whales had an ancestor with 4 legs. He just
>> thinks that his designer didn't have to be involved in whale evolution.
>> It could have happened when the designer wasn't looking. The Designer
>> had to be there over a billion years ago to design the flagellum, but
>> Behe hasn't found anything for the designer to have done for the last
>> half billion years so he has even claimed that the designer could be
>> dead. TO regulars should recall that fiasco. Whales might have evolved
>> by devolution because the designer no longer exists.
>>
>> Ron Okimoto
>
>
> I find nothing online which quotes Behe saying anything substantial
> about whale evolution. Discotut has articles and videos about whale
> evolution which don't quote Behe, and they have articles and videos
> which quote Behe but not about whale evolution.
> Will you cite these sources to which you refer?
>

As I wrote in my recent post to Glenn you just have to google "Behe AND
whale devolution" You will pick up multiple links to 2019 when Behe was
making these claims. The Discovery Institute seems to have made a
couple videos on the devolution claim. It was just a couple years ago,
and Glenn probably missed it back then. Now, Glenn denies what Behe was
telling him. Behe really is claiming that whale evolution is what can
be accomplished by Darwinian means. He claims that it was evolution of
breaking things. Complex systems existed and they were broken in order
to evolve whales. Crazy when you think about it since a terrestrial
mammal, that had been evolving as a terrestrial mammal for well over 200
million years, adapted back to an aquatic lifestyle. What is expected
to happen?

Behe's wiki has a section on it "Darwin Devolves". The main example
that the ID perps made a big deal about was the example of whale
devolution described in that book. Behe was claiming exactly the
opposite of his claims for his IC systems. Behe type IC could not have
evolved by Darwinian means, but whales are pretty much expected to have
evolved by Darwinian means. Sure the designer could have done a botch
job like that, but the designer didn't have to according to Behe. It
was the type of evolution that Behe expected to happen by Darwinian means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe

In looking at Behe's wiki they no longer have his "puffs of smoke"
admission as to how the IC systems would have been created. They also
do not have his admission that his designer may no longer exist. They
still have his admission that IDiocy is equivalent science to Astrology
(He later claimed Astrology of the dark ages and not the astrology of
today, which didn't help with the negative interpretation.). The
section on Dover and how Behe's testimony was turned against the IDiots
is pretty well sorted out.

Ron Okimoto

[Ernest Major]

On 06/09/2021 07:37, Burkhard wrote:
>
> I don't think that for my question the designer matters. The question is
> solely about the boundaries of the term "common descent". Part of your
> question was how Behe can reconcile his advocacy of ID with accepting
> CD. That seems to be possible if and only if one argues that artificial
> modification of DNA of some organisms during the evolutionary chain - by
> whomsoever - does not negate CD. So to probe the consistency of his
> position, I grant for the sake of the argument that some intentional
> interference took place, as he argued,  and ask if under these condition
> we would still speak of CD. If not, then as you suggest his position is
> inconsistent. And the test case for me would indeed be organisms hat we
> know were manipulated 9by us) - do we still say they and their
> descendants share common ancestry with us
>

You may recall the hypothesis that Ray Martinez was an occasionalist
evolutionist, i.e. that position that everything happened according to
the theory of evolution, but God did, was not inconsistent with his
expressed positions.

That is one end of a theistic evolution scale, the other end being
deism, whereby God created the laws of physics and the initial
conditions of the universe, and left natural processes to their own devices.

In between we have positions where God nudges the course of evolution.
This can be undetectable or detectable. In the former case the theistic
evolutionist concedes that natural processes could have produced a
biosphere containing the present complexity, diversity and disparity of
organisms, but interfered to produce the observed biosphere rather than
an alternative. (Typically an alternative lacking humans.) (You could
call that omphalic progressive creationism.) In the latter case the
theistic evolutionist/progressive creationist asserts that natural
processes could not have produced the observed biosphere, and that God's
interference to introduce modified new organisms was necessary. (You
could call that continuous progressive creationism.) If the new
organisms were produced by inducing mutations in the cells of
pre-existing organisms this doesn't break common descent. This seems to
be the position implied by Behe's statements. The alternative of
production of organisms de novo, however similar to pre-existing
organisms, does.

This is a problem for the directed abiogenesis and panspermia
hypothesis. You have to thread you way between the scylla of confining
your interventions to the start of earthly life and the charybdis of
denying common descent.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2021-09-06 13:12:22 +0000, Ernest Major said:

> On 06/09/2021 07:37, Burkhard wrote:
>>
>> I don't think that for my question the designer matters. The question
>> is solely about the boundaries of the term "common descent". Part of
>> your question was how Behe can reconcile his advocacy of ID with
>> accepting CD. That seems to be possible if and only if one argues that
>> artificial modification of DNA of some organisms during the
>> evolutionary chain - by whomsoever - does not negate CD. So to probe
>> the consistency of his position, I grant for the sake of the argument
>> that some intentional interference took place, as he argued,  and ask
>> if under these condition we would still speak of CD. If not, then as
>> you suggest his position is inconsistent. And the test case for me
>> would indeed be organisms hat we know were manipulated 9by us) - do we
>> still say they and their descendants share common ancestry with us
>>
>
> You may recall the hypothesis that Ray Martinez was an occasionalist
> evolutionist, i.e. that position that everything happened according to
> the theory of evolution, but God did, was not inconsistent with his
> expressed positions.

What became of him? Did he ever publish his magnum opus that was going
to revoutionize biology?

Athel -- French and British, living mainly in England until 1987.

[Burkhard]

That's really the one I was interested in. It sounds plausible initially
- small modifications should not break the chain and are in that respect
just like any other mutation.

But one could also imagine quite massive manipulation that is still not
"de ovo" - taking DNA from a number of very different lines and splice
them together, so that the resulting organism would have multiple "parents"

So for me there's another spectrum. On one end, someone increases in a
pretty much sledgehammer way, say by exposing cells to additional
radiation, on the other extreme someone who uses existing DNA more like
a computer programmer would use a library.

Intuitively, we probably would CD consider disrupted at some stage
towards this extreme?

It's difficult to say how much intervention Behe requires, like at the
rest of "ID theory" his is short in detail and explicit commitments to
anything

[Burkhard]

Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> On 2021-09-06 13:12:22 +0000, Ernest Major said:
>
>> On 06/09/2021 07:37, Burkhard wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't think that for my question the designer matters. The question
>>> is solely about the boundaries of the term "common descent". Part of
>>> your question was how Behe can reconcile his advocacy of ID with
>>> accepting CD. That seems to be possible if and only if one argues
>>> that artificial modification of DNA of some organisms during the
>>> evolutionary chain - by whomsoever - does not negate CD. So to probe
>>> the consistency of his position, I grant for the sake of the argument
>>> that some intentional interference took place, as he argued,  and ask
>>> if under these condition we would still speak of CD. If not, then as
>>> you suggest his position is inconsistent. And the test case for me
>>> would indeed be organisms hat we know were manipulated 9by us) - do
>>> we still say they and their descendants share common ancestry with us
>>>
>>
>> You may recall the hypothesis that Ray Martinez was an occasionalist
>> evolutionist, i.e. that position that everything happened according to
>> the theory of evolution, but God did, was not inconsistent with his
>> expressed positions.
>
> What became of him? Did he ever publish his magnum opus that was going
> to revoutionize biology?

MIA, presumed dead. And no, of course.

[Ernest Major]

"de novo"? "de ovo" would be an unfortunate typo in that it has a
meaning which could fit.

>
> So for me there's another spectrum. On one end, someone increases in a
> pretty much sledgehammer way, say by exposing  cells to additional
> radiation, on the other extreme someone who uses existing DNA more like
> a computer programmer would use a library.

Another sledgehammer would be an external event causing a mass
extinction, and providing more scope for adaptive changes. But I suspect
that neither is consistent with Behe's assertions of the limited
capability of natural processes.

>
> Intuitively, we probably would CD consider disrupted at some stage
> towards this extreme?
>
> It's difficult to say how much intervention Behe requires, like at the
> rest of "ID theory" his is short in detail and explicit commitments to
> anything
>
>
>
> The alternative of
>> production of organisms de novo, however similar to pre-existing
>> organisms, does.
>>
>> This is a problem for the directed abiogenesis and panspermia
>> hypothesis. You have to thread you way between the scylla of confining
>> your interventions to the start of earthly life and the charybdis of
>> denying common descent.
>>
>

--
alias Ernest Major

[Bob Casanova]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2021 15:20:08 +0100, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>:

>Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>> On 2021-09-06 13:12:22 +0000, Ernest Major said:
>>
>>> On 06/09/2021 07:37, Burkhard wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I don't think that for my question the designer matters. The question
>>>> is solely about the boundaries of the term "common descent". Part of
>>>> your question was how Behe can reconcile his advocacy of ID with
>>>> accepting CD. That seems to be possible if and only if one argues
>>>> that artificial modification of DNA of some organisms during the
>>>> evolutionary chain - by whomsoever - does not negate CD. So to probe
>>>> the consistency of his position, I grant for the sake of the argument
>>>> that some intentional interference took place, as he argued,  and ask
>>>> if under these condition we would still speak of CD. If not, then as
>>>> you suggest his position is inconsistent. And the test case for me
>>>> would indeed be organisms hat we know were manipulated 9by us) - do
>>>> we still say they and their descendants share common ancestry with us
>>>>
>>>
>>> You may recall the hypothesis that Ray Martinez was an occasionalist
>>> evolutionist, i.e. that position that everything happened according to
>>> the theory of evolution, but God did, was not inconsistent with his
>>> expressed positions.
>>
>> What became of him? Did he ever publish his magnum opus that was going
>> to revoutionize biology?
>
>MIA, presumed dead.
>

IIRC the presumption was based on an obit with his name,
from the correct geographical area, someone found.
>
>And no, of course.
>
Ah, the pity of it all! We could have learned so much!

>
>>>
>>> That is one end of a theistic evolution scale, the other end being
>>> deism, whereby God created the laws of physics and the initial
>>> conditions of the universe, and left natural processes to their own
>>> devices.
>>>
>>> In between we have positions where God nudges the course of evolution.
>>> This can be undetectable or detectable. In the former case the
>>> theistic evolutionist concedes that natural processes could have
>>> produced a biosphere containing the present complexity, diversity and
>>> disparity of organisms, but interfered to produce the observed
>>> biosphere rather than an alternative. (Typically an alternative
>>> lacking humans.) (You could call that omphalic progressive
>>> creationism.) In the latter case the theistic evolutionist/progressive
>>> creationist asserts that natural processes could not have produced the
>>> observed biosphere, and that God's interference to introduce modified
>>> new organisms was necessary. (You could call that continuous
>>> progressive creationism.) If the new organisms were produced by
>>> inducing mutations in the cells of pre-existing organisms this doesn't
>>> break common descent. This seems to be the position implied by Behe's
>>> statements. The alternative of production of organisms de novo,
>>> however similar to pre-existing organisms, does.
>>>
>>> This is a problem for the directed abiogenesis and panspermia
>>> hypothesis. You have to thread you way between the scylla of confining
>>> your interventions to the start of earthly life and the charybdis of
>>> denying common descent.
>>
>>

--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[Bob Casanova]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2021 15:59:47 +0100, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by Ernest Major
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk>:

A chicken/egg thing?

>
>> So for me there's another spectrum. On one end, someone increases in a
>> pretty much sledgehammer way, say by exposing  cells to additional
>> radiation, on the other extreme someone who uses existing DNA more like
>> a computer programmer would use a library.
>
>Another sledgehammer would be an external event causing a mass
>extinction, and providing more scope for adaptive changes. But I suspect
>that neither is consistent with Behe's assertions of the limited
>capability of natural processes.
>

So, much like natural processes themselves, which are also
inconsistent with Behe's assertions, right?

>
>> Intuitively, we probably would CD consider disrupted at some stage
>> towards this extreme?
>>
>> It's difficult to say how much intervention Behe requires, like at the
>> rest of "ID theory" his is short in detail and explicit commitments to
>> anything
>>
>>
>>
>> The alternative of
>>> production of organisms de novo, however similar to pre-existing
>>> organisms, does.
>>>
>>> This is a problem for the directed abiogenesis and panspermia
>>> hypothesis. You have to thread you way between the scylla of confining
>>> your interventions to the start of earthly life and the charybdis of
>>> denying common descent.
>>>
>>
--

[Burkhard]

No, that one def wasn't him More psychology - someone who's invested so
much time over the years on TO, and who never gave any indication of
competing interests or obligations does not disappear from one day to
the other - and given for how long he had described himself as
"retired", age also comes into play. So I'd say the most plausible
explanation is death or incapacity

[Bob Casanova]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2021 17:41:58 +0100, the following appeared in

Ummm... I'm not sure what you intended to write, but your
conclusion is the same as mine; I only noted that an
obituary was found after he disappeared from t.o which
seemed to be his (hence "presumption").

Or did you not realize that "obit" was short for "obituary"?

[Burkhard]

Yes, the conclusion is the same, my point was merely about the evidence.
Someone linked the obit, but the consensus seemed to be that this just
didn't fit Ray at all, apart from the name

The conclusion is sound, but the way to get there different

[Glenn]

Conclusions from unsound and unevidenced assumptions. Where have I seen that before?

[Bob Casanova]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2021 20:11:29 +0100, the following appeared in

OK, although I didn't personally use the obit as any sort of
actual evidence; my comment referred to the conclusions I
read here.

[jillery]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2021 07:37:46 +0100, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>

>grant that point, and ask what it would entail for CD.


Evolution and ID are mutually exclusive explanations for the origins
of novel features, allowing for the single exception of a Designer who
purposely Designed to make it look like evolution. Common Descent is
an explanation of patterns in life, that groups of features appeared
in time and geography consistent with them being inherited from common
ancestors and bestowed onto common descendants. If there were no
genetically isolated populations aka species, then all life would
share a single common genome and Common Descent would be moot.

We know for a fact that your examples of Glofish and Oncomice were
genetically engineered by humans, and so their existence says nothing
about Common Descent. We also know for a fact that horizontal gene
transfer occurs from time to time, most often but not exclusively
among single-cell organisms, and my example of endosymbiosis is an
admittedly unusual example of that. It is precisely because we know
these facts, that our examples say nothing about Common Descent,
except to the extent that once they appeared, descendant populations
would likely inherit them.

IIUC you believe our examples are comparable to Behe's novel features.
They are not, precisely because we know their origins. Once again,
both Behe's Devolution and IC arguments are based on a presumption
that unguided natural processes are mostly incapable of creating the
new information which truly novel features require. If nature can't
create novel features, and humans weren't around to create novel
features, that means they must have been created by a purposeful
Intelligence Designer.

If in fact there were biological features of the type Behe describes,
they would appear de novo, without any evidence of contingent history
or inheritance. By analogy, it's as if you woke up one morning and
found in your garage something truly unprecedented, like a working
time machine. It's not just that you wouldn't know how it got there.
You would have no idea who designed and built it.

That's why Common Descent is inconsistent with ID, because
Intelligently Designed features would suddenly appear like a time
machine in your garage, without prior history. Common Descent isn't
just about how features are inherited. It's also about where those
features came from.

That's why for example a (verified) preCambrian rabbit would be
compelling evidence against evolution, because Earth's biome didn't
accumulate the information to grow a rabbit for another 500 million
years or so. A preCambrian rabbit would be analogous to a time
machine in your garage.

[jillery]

When I type in your search argument, Google returns to me the same
links I described previously.

[jillery]

On Sun, 5 Sep 2021 22:07:42 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>Why do you care? You make up shit about others all the time.

Liar

[RonO]

You should get many links. You just have to go to the ones describing
the junk from 2019, and as I mention it has a short section in Behe's Wiki.

https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/researchers-whales-took-to-water-by-losing-genes/

This link also has a Behe video.

There is an Amazon link to the book Darwin Devolves where Behe put
forward the stupid notion. Behe was really claiming that whale
evolution was the type of evolution that you could expect by Darwinian
means because it was evolution by breaking things. He holds that his IC
type systems could not have evolved by Darwinian means. We likely do
not hear much about this book anymore because anti-evolution
creationists like Glenn don't like being stabbed in the back. The
Discovery Institute has their Sternberg claims that there wasn't enough
time to evolve Whales and Behe came in and claimed that whale evolution
was no big deal because it was the type of evolution he would expect to
have happened by natural processes. For a while the IDiots tried to
make a big deal about evolution by breaking things, but it was a stupid
argument because it was still evolution. Behe did not deny that whales
evolved from terrestrial mammals. He only claimed that such evolution
wasn't the type that required his intelligent designer.

QUOTE from WIKI:
Lang and Rice's assessment noted that while Behe rightfully acknowledges
that organisms have common ancestry, it is posited that a designer is
required for more distant relationships like at the family level, and
that the presentation of degradative processes is exaggerated with
evidence of beneficial adaptations dodged. The article also criticized
the use of false analogies and neglecting evidence of new genetic raw
material production for evolution ("Behe is correct that the loss of
genetic information is an important mechanism. However, the opposing
processes of gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer, and
introgression balance out gene loss, providing a source of new genetic
material"). They then concluded with examples of adaptation that
contradict the book's conclusions and expound on the flaws of
Irreducible Complexity, adding that "why evolution by natural selection
is difficult for so many to accept is beyond the scope of this review;
however, it is not for a lack of evidence."[48]
END QUOTE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe

Ron Okimoto

[Glenn]

On Sunday, September 5, 2021 at 7:55:07 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> Behe:
>
Good timing!

"Phylogenetic Conflict Is Common and the “Hierarchy” Is Far from “Perfect”"

"One paper in the journal Genome Research put it plainly, that “different proteins generate different phylogenetic tree[s].”

"A 2009 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution notes that “evolutionary trees from different genes often have conflicting branching patterns.” Likewise, a 2012 paper in Biological Reviews acknowledges that “phylogenetic conflict is common, and frequently the norm rather than the exception.” Echoing these views, a January 2009 cover story and review article in New Scientist observed that today the tree-of-life project “lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.” As the article explains, “Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded,” because the evidence suggests that “the evolution of animals and plants isn’t exactly tree-like.”"

More links at:

https://evolutionnews.org/2021/09/phylogenetic-conflict-is-common-and-the-hierarchy-is-far-from-perfect/

[Glenn]

If your mind wasn't diseased, you'd know that is a lie.

[Burkhard]

OK, if you import substantial parts of the theory of evolution into the
very concept of common descent, and furthermore set evolution and design
as mutually exclusive explanations so that CD can only be part of the
former, then Behe is of course incompatible with CD - but then you
answered your own question, and you did it by definition.

So when Behe claims that his ideas are compatible with CD, he arguably
would have to have a different definition of CD in mind. As a working
hypothesis, that would be one that treats CD as a "bare fact", that is
that all organisms share through reproduction ancestry with a single
root ancestor.

If there were no
> genetically isolated populations aka species, then all life would
> share a single common genome and Common Descent would be moot.
>
> We know for a fact that your examples of Glofish and Oncomice were
> genetically engineered by humans, and so their existence says nothing
> about Common Descent.
>We also know for a fact that horizontal gene
> transfer occurs from time to time, most often but not exclusively
> among single-cell organisms, and my example of endosymbiosis is an
> admittedly unusual example of that. It is precisely because we know
> these facts, that our examples say nothing about Common Descent,
> except to the extent that once they appeared, descendant populations
> would likely inherit them.

I'd press you on this one. What do you mean with "say nothing about"
common descent? Do you mean "common descent alone does not explain any
longer all the traits they have"? Yes, that's arguably true, but
unproblematic, also for Behe. Or are your arguing that Glofish and
oncomice should not be considered to be related to us, or any other life
form, any longer through common descent? (CD in the sense of a "bare
fact" mentioned above)? As I said, this is a position one can take -
and then indeed, Behe's theory would be incompatible with common
descent. My intuition though would be closer to Ernst, I would not
remove them altogether from the tree of life merely because they have
one or several traits that did not evolve.

>
> IIUC you believe our examples are comparable to Behe's novel features.
> They are not, precisely because we know their origins. Once again,
> both Behe's Devolution and IC arguments are based on a presumption
> that unguided natural processes are mostly incapable of creating the
> new information which truly novel features require. If nature can't
> create novel features, and humans weren't around to create novel
> features, that means they must have been created by a purposeful
> Intelligence Designer.

To me that still sounds like a conflation of two different things, the
epistemological and the ontological issue. One is how, if at all, can we
know if a given trait is designed or evolved. The second is if we know
that it is designed, if this is compatible with CD.

To test if Behe's position is consistent, one has to assume its
statements as true. Therefore, that we only know of Glofish etc stops
being a distinguishing feature. That's separate from the reasons he
gives for his position, and reduces to "if we assume design, is this
incompatible with CD"

>
> If in fact there were biological features of the type Behe describes,
> they would appear de novo, without any evidence of contingent history
> or inheritance. By analogy, it's as if you woke up one morning and
> found in your garage something truly unprecedented, like a working
> time machine. It's not just that you wouldn't know how it got there.
> You would have no idea who designed and built it.
>
> That's why Common Descent is inconsistent with ID, because
> Intelligently Designed features would suddenly appear like a time
> machine in your garage, without prior history.

Why would that follow? Take the famous example of sickle cell anemia and
malaria: a simple mutation that is normally harmful is beneficial in a
specific environment as it protects against malaria. If some
bioengineers had through this through from first principles, they could
have forced this mutation just as much. The outcome would not be
different from the naturally occurring event at all. This is not a
question of designed vs evolved trait, only about the degree with which
the designer had to intervene - as I said, to me this seems to be a
spectrum with fuzzy borders.

Now you could argue that Behe ultimately requires such a consistent and
large scale intervention that he ends up on the end of the spectrum
where we may think that this is now indeed interrupting the line of
descent. I wouldn't know, my impression always was that his theory is
way too underdefined and empty to allow for such a precise statement.
But that is a different question from whether design or intentional
interference in principle is incompatible with CD

Common Descent isn't
> just about how features are inherited. It's also about where those
> features came from.

As I said above, if you include this in the very definition of CD, then
yes, Behe's position is arguably incompatible with it. But that is proof
by definition. I'm not (yet) convinced that this is a better definition
(by whatever standard you chose to evaluate definitions, more in line
with the usage of people working in the field; enabling helpful
distinctions; allowing unambiguous application etc). Again, for the
Glofish it would mean that it is now "outside" the tree of life and not
any longer related to us. That seems to me to be overreach, it excludes
too many organisms from the domain of evolutionary biology, and means
that we can't any longer say that all living things are related by
common descent. It means we can't any longer decide if a given organism
is related by common descent either - yes, we know about glofish and
oncomouse But it is not beyond imagination to think of maybe illegal
experiments that escaped into the wild form a private laboratory without
anyone noticing. If even such a minimal change like the ones form th
examples (and we can think of even smaller ones) means the resulting
organism isn't any longer related to all other organisms, even though it
had parents that were, then we can't any longer strictly say of a given
organism that is is related to every other one.

[jillery]

Yes, I get many links, but as I said previously, none of them quote

Behe saying anything substantial about whale evolution.

>https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/researchers-whales-took-to-water-by-losing-genes/


Yes, I got that cited article. It starts with an abstract from a
paper which identifies "85 gene losses" which helped to enable whale
evolution. This isn't sup rising, considering all the things a
terrestrial mammal no longer needs in a marine environment.

What is entirely missing from the abstract, and possibly from the
paper itself, is any mention of new functions which a marine mammal
requires but terrestrial mammals don't.

I say "possibly" because all of the links to "advances.sciencemag.org"
are broken, coming back with "this page isn't working".

More to the point, the abstract and paper are almost certainly not
from Behe.

A comment embedded in the article refers to yet another EvolutionNews
article, which says it cites Behe alleging insufficient timescales:

<https://evolutionnews.org/2018/03/of-whales-and-timescales/>

but I found no links to those Behe cites in either EvolutionNews
article.

>This link also has a Behe video.

Here's the link:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNe-syuDJBg&t=3s>

Yes, I got that cited video. It's an hour-long Eric Metaxas interview
of Michael Behe, part of the "socratesinthecity" series.
The following is the totality of it saying anything about whales:
***************************************
@20:28
[Metaxas]
But when you say complex changes, in other words when, yeah,
when you're talking about the length of hair, or on the cover of your
book you have Darwin's famous finches right? So if you got a Finch
some finches have bigger beaks some have more narrow beaks,
whatever... Not exactly complicated right? It's like the hair of the
deer. It's like simple. But you're talking about, how does a *whale*
comes into being? And the suggestion of course is what? That some
mammals eventually are wandering in the water, and that, you know,
suddenly, Shazam! [sneers]... it's a whale. I mean, David Berlinski
brilliantly mocks this stuff in his writings, because it's it is very
funny when you start talking about... Okay, so what's necessary for a
land mammal to become a whale who is also a mammal? What's necessary?
And the number of things, like it's so complex, that it becomes a kind
of madness. So if you say that to a strict Darwinianist, Darwinist,
what what do they say?

[Behe]
They say you're a creationist [laughter].
********************************

So Metaxas doesn't ask Behe about whale evolution, and Behe doesn't
answer anything about whale evolution. I don't know about you, but I
am singularly unimpressed by both Metaxas' mocking question and Behe's
sarcastic answer. Perhaps it's just me.

>There is an Amazon link to the book Darwin Devolves where Behe put
>forward the stupid notion.

The Amazon link provides a link to this:

<https://darwindevolves.com/criticism/>

with links to criticisms of "Darwin Devolves" and responses to those
criticisms. However, none of those criticisms nor the responses say
anything about whales, much less whale evolution.

Nothing there about whales or whale evolution, either.

>>> In looking at Behe's wiki they no longer have his "puffs of smoke"
>>> admission as to how the IC systems would have been created. They also
>>> do not have his admission that his designer may no longer exist. They
>>> still have his admission that IDiocy is equivalent science to Astrology
>>> (He later claimed Astrology of the dark ages and not the astrology of
>>> today, which didn't help with the negative interpretation.). The
>>> section on Dover and how Behe's testimony was turned against the IDiots
>>> is pretty well sorted out.
>>>
>>> Ron Okimoto
>>

[jillery]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2021 15:53:11 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
<acor...@imm.cnrs.fr> wrote:

>On 2021-09-06 13:12:22 +0000, Ernest Major said:
>
>> On 06/09/2021 07:37, Burkhard wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't think that for my question the designer matters. The question
>>> is solely about the boundaries of the term "common descent". Part of
>>> your question was how Behe can reconcile his advocacy of ID with
>>> accepting CD. That seems to be possible if and only if one argues that
>>> artificial modification of DNA of some organisms during the
>>> evolutionary chain - by whomsoever - does not negate CD. So to probe
>>> the consistency of his position, I grant for the sake of the argument
>>> that some intentional interference took place, as he argued,  and ask
>>> if under these condition we would still speak of CD. If not, then as
>>> you suggest his position is inconsistent. And the test case for me
>>> would indeed be organisms hat we know were manipulated 9by us) - do we
>>> still say they and their descendants share common ancestry with us
>>>
>>
>> You may recall the hypothesis that Ray Martinez was an occasionalist
>> evolutionist, i.e. that position that everything happened according to
>> the theory of evolution, but God did, was not inconsistent with his
>> expressed positions.
>
>What became of him? Did he ever publish his magnum opus that was going
>to revoutionize biology?

Nope. Martinez left in the middle of his explanation on the
difference between Biblical adaptation and scientific micro-evolution.
The thoughtlessness of some people, to go off and die without telling
anybody first!

[jillery]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 07:38:16 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>On Sunday, September 5, 2021 at 7:55:07 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
>> Behe:
>>
>Good timing!
>
>"Phylogenetic Conflict Is Common and the “Hierarchy” Is Far from “Perfect”"
>
>"One paper in the journal Genome Research put it plainly, that “different proteins generate different phylogenetic tree[s].”
>
>"A 2009 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution notes that “evolutionary trees from different genes often have conflicting branching patterns.” Likewise, a 2012 paper in Biological Reviews acknowledges that “phylogenetic conflict is common, and frequently the norm rather than the exception.” Echoing these views, a January 2009 cover story and review article in New Scientist observed that today the tree-of-life project “lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.” As the article explains, “Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded,” because the evidence suggests that “the evolution of animals and plants isn’t exactly tree-like.”"

So their criticism is with branching trees as a conceptual model of
Common Descent, but not with Common Descent itself.

>More links at:
>
>https://evolutionnews.org/2021/09/phylogenetic-conflict-is-common-and-the-hierarchy-is-far-from-perfect/
>

[jillery]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 08:46:48 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

Your assertion of disease is mindless noise. Your "that" is
ambiguous. IOW MOTS

[Glenn]

On Tuesday, September 7, 2021 at 9:05:07 AM UTC-7, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 07:38:16 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
> wrote:
> >On Sunday, September 5, 2021 at 7:55:07 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> >> Behe:
> >>
> >Good timing!
> >
> >"Phylogenetic Conflict Is Common and the “Hierarchy” Is Far from “Perfect”"
> >
> >"One paper in the journal Genome Research put it plainly, that “different proteins generate different phylogenetic tree[s].”
> >
> >"A 2009 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution notes that “evolutionary trees from different genes often have conflicting branching patterns.” Likewise, a 2012 paper in Biological Reviews acknowledges that “phylogenetic conflict is common, and frequently the norm rather than the exception.” Echoing these views, a January 2009 cover story and review article in New Scientist observed that today the tree-of-life project “lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.” As the article explains, “Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded,” because the evidence suggests that “the evolution of animals and plants isn’t exactly tree-like.”"

> >More links at:
> >
> >https://evolutionnews.org/2021/09/phylogenetic-conflict-is-common-and-the-hierarchy-is-far-from-perfect/

> So their criticism is with branching trees as a conceptual model of
> Common Descent, but not with Common Descent itself.

The author of the article is not a "their".

As I said recently, you make up shit about others all the time.

"Returning to the 2021 PNAS paper, it finds a correlation between periods of rapid innovation and the degree of conflict in gene-based trees. From my vantage point, as a skeptic of universal common ancestry, conflicts between genes that seem to have appeared during periods of morphological innovation indicate that common ancestry is not what generates new types of organisms. The paper, of course, does not question common ancestry. Instead it invokes various ad hoc explanations for the conflicts, attributing these conflicts to population processes such a “changes in population size, rapid speciation, and incomplete lineage sorting.”

Regardless of whether universal common ancestry is right or wrong, the point here is that conflict in phylogenetic trees is very common, and the genetic data is far from producing a “perfect hierarchy,” as Dawkins put it. In fact, phylogenetic conflict seems to be greatest precisely in genes associated with the appearance of new types of organisms in the history of life. Dawkins got this point wrong, and he got it wrong precisely because this sort of conflicting phylogenetic data is not what a standard neo-Darwinian model would lead one to expect!"

[Mark Isaak]

I disagree that the two are mutually exclusive. Domestic breeding could
be considered an example of intelligent design *and* evolution.
Granted, it is possible to define evolution so as to rule out design,
but that seems a rather arbitrary restriction.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred
to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett

[Glenn]

Practicing your willful stupidity and mindless noise again, I see.

[Glenn]

So random mutation and natural selection seem to you to be arbitrary concepts.

[jillery]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 16:53:06 +0100, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>

I acknowledge my opinion is that biological evolution and Intelligent
Design are mutually exclusive explanations for the origins of novel
features. I deny my opinion is a matter of definition. Instead, my
opinion is based on the premises of the concepts. As long as ID
presumes an interventionist Designer who twiddles with natural history
to make highly unlikely things happen more often than would otherwise,
ID necessarily contrasts with natural history resulting from unguided
natural processes and contingency.

Also, it's still unclear what you think is my question. To clarify,
my question is: How does Behe reconcile his claims that he supports
evolution and denies Creationism, with his many publications that deny
evolution as an explanation for the diversity of life, and instead
presumes the intervention, however occasionally, of a purposeful,
intelligent and supernatural Designer?

>So when Behe claims that his ideas are compatible with CD, he arguably
>would have to have a different definition of CD in mind. As a working
>hypothesis, that would be one that treats CD as a "bare fact", that is
>that all organisms share through reproduction ancestry with a single
>root ancestor.

So how would your working hypothesis reconcile itself with solid
evidence of for example a preCambrian rabbit?

[Burkhard]

I took this one "I can't take seriously Behe's claim that he accepts
evolution and/or common descent" and focussed exclusively on the common
descent part - so you get "I can't take seriously Behe's claim that he
accepts [...] common descent.

As I said, I think that's potentially an interesting question - under
what conditions, if any, does design negate common descent.

I gave two edge cases as I see them, both driven more by intuition than
theory: a minimal interference that leaves most of the parents' DNA
intact and just introduces a new trait doesn't. A more futuristic and
substantial one might - the point where it may become difficult to say
who "the" parents were (combined sequences across multiple species,
whole thing incubated in yet another one, etc

That would however make it a question of degree, with fuzzy edges

To clarify,
> my question is: How does Behe reconcile his claims that he supports
> evolution and denies Creationism, with his many publications that deny
> evolution as an explanation for the diversity of life, and instead
> presumes the intervention, however occasionally, of a purposeful,
> intelligent and supernatural Designer?

If my analysis above is correct, then a simple answer could be: "because
the nature of the intervention is more similar to the Glofish, and
sufficiently rare. " Now, one does of course not have to take his word
for this, and a legitimate challenge would be: the amount of
intervention that Behe is now explicitly or by implication committed to
would require the type of substantial interference above that negates
CD. Additionally, for the majority of interesting traits, an account of
how they emerged would be of the type "why do glofish glow".

It would however be a question of degree in either case. Now, to be
honest I don't find him interesting or relevant enough to get into the
type of detailed exegesis that asks how much design is implied by what
he says. Mainly because I'd consider it a fools errant, like nailing
soup to a wall. To answer this question would need a theory that is
sufficiently detailed and explicit - how exactly did the designer work,
what did they do and when. So I'd say paradoxically, you grant him too
much. I can quite happily live with the notion that his version of ID is
broadly speaking "consistent with" the ToE, simply because it is so
vacuous that it is consistent with pretty much everything. And that's
not a good thing, obviously.

>
>
>> So when Behe claims that his ideas are compatible with CD, he arguably
>> would have to have a different definition of CD in mind. As a working
>> hypothesis, that would be one that treats CD as a "bare fact", that is
>> that all organisms share through reproduction ancestry with a single
>> root ancestor.
>
>
> So how would your working hypothesis reconcile itself with solid
> evidence of for example a preCambrian rabbit?

Sorry, I need ot get back to you on this, as I'm not sure how you
exactly you mean the task. My working hypothesis was a guess at Behe's
answer, how he might understand UCD in a way that is consistent with
everything else he said. Are yuo now asking me how I think Behe would
respond to the Cambrian rabbit? I have no idea tbh. Or do you ask how I
would interpret it, using the "bare fact" definition of UCD? I don't
think I have much to say on the former, on the latter though:

It would throw a major spanner in the works, and require a massive
rethinking of our theories. But as with all falsification, it does not
tell us on its own which parts of the theory we have to abandon or to
modify (that was always a problem with Popper) If it stays an isolated
event that does not form a pattern, it would just be an anomaly.
Irritating but not too big a deal, we just don't know how it fits in. We
leave our "big" theory as it is, and simply leave the PCR outside its
explanatory scope, for now.

A possible answer in that case is that it is indeed not linked by
descent to any other species. Say some space aliens visited earth, and
their pet(s) escaped. That means UCD does not hold for them.

Other answers could maintain UCD - maybe life on earth is considerably
older than we thought, had evolved rabbits first time round, then a
catastrophic event wiped out all life but for the very smallest and
simplest forms, and from then on we have the "big reset" (and for some
strange reasons only rabbits left a trace - and of course if it really
looks like a rabbit we have to rethink the idea that evolution, if
reset, would deliver very different results second time round, and we'd
have to explain why evolution with necessity leads to rabbits.

Now, that last point and only that last point would lead us to a
possible design argument. It would indicate that someone is really fond
of rabbits.

Or we have to accept that our world is much more complicated than we
thought and we just don't know what the heck is going on.

[Glenn]

Indeed. How exactly did flagella evolve. How exactly did evolution work, what did evolution do and when. Be sufficiently detailed and explicit.

[Ernest Major]

On 07/09/2021 16:53, Burkhard wrote:
>
> As I said above, if you include this in the very definition of CD, then
> yes, Behe's position is arguably incompatible with it. But that is proof
> by definition. I'm not (yet) convinced that this is a better definition
> (by whatever standard you chose to evaluate definitions, more in line
> with the usage of people working in the field; enabling helpful
> distinctions; allowing unambiguous application etc). Again, for the
> Glofish it would mean that it is now "outside" the tree of life and not
> any longer related to us. That seems to me to be overreach, it excludes
> too many organisms from the domain of evolutionary biology, and means
> that we can't any longer say that all living things are related by
> common descent. It means we can't any longer decide if a given organism
> is related by common descent either - yes, we know about glofish and
> oncomouse But it is not beyond imagination to think of maybe illegal
> experiments that escaped into the wild form a private laboratory without
> anyone noticing. If even such a minimal change like the ones form th
> examples (and we can think of even smaller ones) means the resulting
> organism isn't any longer related to all other organisms, even though it
> had parents that were, then we can't any longer strictly say of a given
> organism that is is related to every other one.

It seems me that if you're going to exclude the oncomouse and glofish
you also lose golden rice, and roundup-resistant crops, and Bt-toxin
expressing crops, and various microorganisms involved in the production
of pharmaceuticals (such as monoclonal antibody drugs). And if you
extend the principle to include such manipulations as induced chromosome
doubling then crop triticale goes, as do any wheat and brassica
cultivars which have a synthetic wheat or brassica in their ancestry.

--
alias Ernest Major

[jillery]

There was a recent topic which dealt with the legitimate distinction
between Creationisms and creationism. I know you know the difference
between Intelligent Design and intelligent design. Why do you
obfuscate the topic?

[jillery]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 09:26:15 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>

wrote:

>On Tuesday, September 7, 2021 at 9:05:07 AM UTC-7, jillery wrote:
>> On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 07:38:16 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
>> wrote:
>> >On Sunday, September 5, 2021 at 7:55:07 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
>> >> Behe:
>> >>
>> >Good timing!
>> >
>> >"Phylogenetic Conflict Is Common and the “Hierarchy” Is Far from “Perfect”"
>> >
>> >"One paper in the journal Genome Research put it plainly, that “different proteins generate different phylogenetic tree[s].”
>> >
>> >"A 2009 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution notes that “evolutionary trees from different genes often have conflicting branching patterns.” Likewise, a 2012 paper in Biological Reviews acknowledges that “phylogenetic conflict is common, and frequently the norm rather than the exception.” Echoing these views, a January 2009 cover story and review article in New Scientist observed that today the tree-of-life project “lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.” As the article explains, “Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded,” because the evidence suggests that “the evolution of animals and plants isn’t exactly tree-like.”"
>
>> >More links at:
>> >
>> >https://evolutionnews.org/2021/09/phylogenetic-conflict-is-common-and-the-hierarchy-is-far-from-perfect/
>
>> So their criticism is with branching trees as a conceptual model of
>> Common Descent, but not with Common Descent itself.
>
>The author of the article is not a "their".
>
>As I said recently, you make up shit about others all the time.

Your cite is to a paper with several authors, and to a journal, and to
several institutions. References to all of these correctly use the
plural "their".

Like I said, you post willfully stupid made-up crap about anything all
the time.

And what you said recently about me remains a willfully stupid lie.

[jillery]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 11:25:42 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>Indeed. How exactly did flagella evolve. How exactly did evolution work, what did evolution do and when. Be sufficiently detailed and explicit.

Before you demand exact detailed explanations from anybody, first you
provide exact detailed explanations for how ID works, and what ID did
and when.

[Glenn]

On Tuesday, September 7, 2021 at 1:20:07 PM UTC-7, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 09:26:15 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
> wrote:
>
> >On Tuesday, September 7, 2021 at 9:05:07 AM UTC-7, jillery wrote:
> >> On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 07:38:16 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
> >> wrote:
> >> >On Sunday, September 5, 2021 at 7:55:07 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> >> >> Behe:
> >> >>
> >> >Good timing!
> >> >
> >> >"Phylogenetic Conflict Is Common and the “Hierarchy” Is Far from “Perfect”"
> >> >
> >> >"One paper in the journal Genome Research put it plainly, that “different proteins generate different phylogenetic tree[s].”
> >> >
> >> >"A 2009 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution notes that “evolutionary trees from different genes often have conflicting branching patterns.” Likewise, a 2012 paper in Biological Reviews acknowledges that “phylogenetic conflict is common, and frequently the norm rather than the exception.” Echoing these views, a January 2009 cover story and review article in New Scientist observed that today the tree-of-life project “lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.” As the article explains, “Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded,” because the evidence suggests that “the evolution of animals and plants isn’t exactly tree-like.”"
> >
> >> >More links at:
> >> >
> >> >https://evolutionnews.org/2021/09/phylogenetic-conflict-is-common-and-the-hierarchy-is-far-from-perfect/
> >
> >> So their criticism is with branching trees as a conceptual model of
> >> Common Descent, but not with Common Descent itself.
> >
> >The author of the article is not a "their".
> >
> >As I said recently, you make up shit about others all the time.

> Your cite is to a paper with several authors, and to a journal, and to
> several institutions. References to all of these correctly use the
> plural "their".

Horseshit. The article is penned by Casey Luskin, not several authors, and not "to" a journal, and not "to" several institutions.
The various cites provided by Luskin does not support the inference that all the participants hold the same opinions. There is no "their".

>
> Like I said, you post willfully stupid made-up crap about anything all
> the time.
>
> And what you said recently about me remains a willfully stupid lie.
> --

Your above post is more of the same. You make up shit all the time.

[Glenn]

On Tuesday, September 7, 2021 at 1:25:07 PM UTC-7, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 11:25:42 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
> wrote:
> >Indeed. How exactly did flagella evolve. How exactly did evolution work, what did evolution do and when. Be sufficiently detailed and explicit.
> Before you demand exact detailed explanations from anybody, first you
> provide exact detailed explanations for how ID works, and what ID did
> and when.
> --

Before you demand exact detailed explanations from anybody, first you provide exact detailed explanations for how evolution works, and what evolution did and when. It should be easy; evolutionary theory has been around much longer than ID. Again, start with flagella.

[jillery]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 18:46:33 +0100, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>

What you refer to above is my assertion of skepticism. At the time I
wrote it, I wasn't asking anybody anything.

>As I said, I think that's potentially an interesting question - under
>what conditions, if any, does design negate common descent.
>
>I gave two edge cases as I see them, both driven more by intuition than
>theory: a minimal interference that leaves most of the parents' DNA
>intact and just introduces a new trait doesn't. A more futuristic and
>substantial one might - the point where it may become difficult to say
>who "the" parents were (combined sequences across multiple species,
>whole thing incubated in yet another one, etc
>
>That would however make it a question of degree, with fuzzy edges
>
> To clarify,
>> my question is: How does Behe reconcile his claims that he supports
>> evolution and denies Creationism, with his many publications that deny
>> evolution as an explanation for the diversity of life, and instead
>> presumes the intervention, however occasionally, of a purposeful,
>> intelligent and supernatural Designer?

The above is how I would have phrased my skepticism if I was asking a
question about it.

>If my analysis above is correct, then a simple answer could be: "because
>the nature of the intervention is more similar to the Glofish, and
>sufficiently rare. " Now, one does of course not have to take his word
>for this, and a legitimate challenge would be: the amount of
>intervention that Behe is now explicitly or by implication committed to
>would require the type of substantial interference above that negates
>CD. Additionally, for the majority of interesting traits, an account of
>how they emerged would be of the type "why do glofish glow".

I don't question in this topic Behe's sincerity, but instead the
coherence of his arguments. And it's not just the quantity of his
Designer's presumed interventions that's a problem, but also their
quality, specifically the creation of multiple features which are
beyond nature.

>It would however be a question of degree in either case. Now, to be
>honest I don't find him interesting or relevant enough to get into the
>type of detailed exegesis that asks how much design is implied by what
>he says. Mainly because I'd consider it a fools errant, like nailing
>soup to a wall. To answer this question would need a theory that is
>sufficiently detailed and explicit - how exactly did the designer work,
>what did they do and when. So I'd say paradoxically, you grant him too
>much. I can quite happily live with the notion that his version of ID is
>broadly speaking "consistent with" the ToE, simply because it is so
>vacuous that it is consistent with pretty much everything. And that's
>not a good thing, obviously.

IIUC you think I grant Behe too much credibility. I assure you that's
not the case. Instead, I recognize the credibility others grant him.
There's a difference. You may not be aware of it, but he is one of
the goto spokespersons for pseudoskeptics who want a soundbite against
evolution. I freely admit that I take equally seriously all
pseudoskepticism by those who are given a public platform.

>>> So when Behe claims that his ideas are compatible with CD, he arguably
>>> would have to have a different definition of CD in mind. As a working
>>> hypothesis, that would be one that treats CD as a "bare fact", that is
>>> that all organisms share through reproduction ancestry with a single
>>> root ancestor.
>>
>>
>> So how would your working hypothesis reconcile itself with solid
>> evidence of for example a preCambrian rabbit?
>
>Sorry, I need ot get back to you on this, as I'm not sure how you
>exactly you mean the task. My working hypothesis was a guess at Behe's
>answer, how he might understand UCD in a way that is consistent with
>everything else he said. Are yuo now asking me how I think Behe would
>respond to the Cambrian rabbit? I have no idea tbh. Or do you ask how I
>would interpret it, using the "bare fact" definition of UCD? I don't
>think I have much to say on the former, on the latter though:

To review, you described a working hypothesis of Common Descent. I
asked my question to you, to see how you would apply your working
hypothesis to a relevant hypothetical that would challenge it, to help
me understand how my expressed opinions are as incorrect as you say
they are.

> It would throw a major spanner in the works, and require a massive
>rethinking of our theories. But as with all falsification, it does not
>tell us on its own which parts of the theory we have to abandon or to
>modify (that was always a problem with Popper) If it stays an isolated
>event that does not form a pattern, it would just be an anomaly.
>Irritating but not too big a deal, we just don't know how it fits in. We
>leave our "big" theory as it is, and simply leave the PCR outside its
>explanatory scope, for now.
>
>A possible answer in that case is that it is indeed not linked by
>descent to any other species. Say some space aliens visited earth, and
>their pet(s) escaped. That means UCD does not hold for them.
>
>Other answers could maintain UCD - maybe life on earth is considerably
>older than we thought, had evolved rabbits first time round, then a
>catastrophic event wiped out all life but for the very smallest and
>simplest forms, and from then on we have the "big reset" (and for some
>strange reasons only rabbits left a trace - and of course if it really
>looks like a rabbit we have to rethink the idea that evolution, if
>reset, would deliver very different results second time round, and we'd
>have to explain why evolution with necessity leads to rabbits.
>
>Now, that last point and only that last point would lead us to a
>possible design argument. It would indicate that someone is really fond
>of rabbits.
>
>Or we have to accept that our world is much more complicated than we
>thought and we just don't know what the heck is going on.

Thank you for taking the time to share your opinions with me.

[jillery]

The notion that GMOs somehow challenge the concept of Common Descent,
is a strawman.

[Glenn]

That's a strawman.

[RonO]

Run in denial like you did before, but it doesn't change reality. You
will be just as wrong and lying again the next time around.

REPOST what Glenn is snipping and lying to himself about:

You should get many links. You just have to go to the ones describing
the junk from 2019, and as I mention it has a short section in Behe's Wiki.

https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/researchers-whales-took-to-water-by-losing-genes/

This link also has a Behe video.

There is an Amazon link to the book Darwin Devolves where Behe put
forward the stupid notion. Behe was really claiming that whale
evolution was the type of evolution that you could expect by Darwinian

END REPOSTED part:

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

The example Behe gave in the book was whales.

Here is one of the articles from the Discovery Institute.

https://evolutionnews.org/2019/10/darwin-devolves-evidence-keeps-rolling-in/

QUOTE:
The second paper is an in-depth look at genetic changes associated with
the evolution of the cetacean (whales and dolphins) lineage. This is the
kind of amazing work that is now possible in our brave new world of
relatively easy genome sequencing. The authors compared the genomes of a
half dozen different cetacean species to scores of other mammalian
genomes. So did they find some jazzy new cetacean molecular machinery?
Or complex, constructive changes in the whale genome to explain its
fantastic change in shape and lifestyle?

Well, no. They found a lot of devolution.

We found 85 gene losses. Some of these were likely beneficial for
cetaceans, for example, by reducing the risk of thrombus formation
during diving (F12 and KLKB1), erroneous DNA damage repair (POLM), and
oxidative stress–induced lung inflammation (MAP3K19). Additional gene
losses may reflect other diving-related adaptations, such as enhanced
vasoconstriction during the diving response (mediated by SLC6A18) and
altered pulmonary surfactant composition (SEC14L3), while loss of SLC4A9
relates to a reduced need for saliva. Last, loss of melatonin synthesis
and receptor genes (AANAT, ASMT, and MTNR1A/B) may have been a
precondition for adopting unihemispheric sleep. Our findings suggest
that some genes lost in ancestral cetaceans were likely involved in
adapting to a fully aquatic lifestyle.

Adaptation by Breaking Things
A couple of points:

1) At least 85 changes — and probably many more — were needed for whale
evolution. That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get
stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long.

2) As I explain in Darwin Devolves, adaptation by breaking or blunting
genes is expected to be very much faster than constructive evolution, so
it should dominate all evolutionary time scales. As the current paper
helps to show, the evidence for that is growing. Not only is devolution
the dominant mode in microevolution we observe in real time in lab
experiments today, but also in the macroevolutionary change that we
infer from genome sequences over geological ages — punctuated by bursts
of new information. There is no hint of significant, constructive
Darwinian molecular changes at any time scale.
END QUOTE:

This is what they were talking about in the Wiki. Behe is claiming that
this is the type of evolution that his designer doesn't need to be
involved in. It is the type of evolution he expects by Darwinian
mechanisms.

Behe is not claiming that his god did a botch job on whales. He is
claiming that devolution is all you can expect by natural processes.
The ID perps don't make a big deal about that conclusion because all
they are interested in is the denial. Anything that is wrong with
evolution is good for them even if it is evolution.

Ron Okimoto

[Glenn]

Nope. Behe is claiming "That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get

stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long. "

And you have not supported other claims like "Whales evolving from land animals is devolution to Behe" and "He just

thinks that his designer didn't have to be involved in whale evolution."

>It is the type of evolution he expects by Darwinian
> mechanisms.
>
> Behe is not claiming that his god did a botch job on whales. He is
> claiming that devolution is all you can expect by natural processes.

Yep, the "Edge of Evolution". You've failed to support your claims about what Behe claims about whales. He's criticized whale evolution before as he does above, and has never claimed that Darwinian evolution produced whales from land animals. He does not, as you say, claim that "this is the type of evolution that his designer doesn't need to be involved in".

Like jillery, you make shit up all the time.

[RonO]

What does Behe claim above. He claims that the evolution that occurred
was expected. What do you think that he is claiming? Behe is the one
that believes in common descent. He knows that whales evolved from land
mammals, and he is claiming that it was devolution. Evolution by
breaking things.

Denial is really stupid. The article cited was written by Behe. The
quoted material is what he wrote. Behe is obviously talking about the
evolution of whales, and what does he claim about that evolution?

QUOTE from above:

Not only is devolution the dominant mode in microevolution we observe in
real time in lab experiments today, but also in the macroevolutionary
change that we infer from genome sequences over geological ages —
punctuated by bursts of new information.

END QUOTE:

Denial is stupid. Why do you think that this has died. No IDiot wants
to deal with it, and Behe made a big mistake in pointing it out.

All the ID perps want out of it is the denial, not the conclusions that
biological evolution happened that way.

Ron Okimoto

[Glenn]

No, he doesn't. "The evolution that occurred" is your reference to evolution of whales. Behe does not make that association.
What he actually says is "As I explain in Darwin Devolves, adaptation by breaking or blunting genes is expected to be very much faster than constructive evolution, so it should dominate all evolutionary time scales."

>What do you think that he is claiming?

Exactly what he said. I just reproduced the quote.

>Behe is the one
> that believes in common descent. He knows that whales evolved from land
> mammals, and he is claiming that it was devolution. Evolution by
> breaking things.

You're making that up. He has not said that whales evolved from land mammals, nor has he claimed it was devolution.
Actually, he criticizes the idea: 'That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long. "

>
> Denial is really stupid. The article cited was written by Behe. The
> quoted material is what he wrote. Behe is obviously talking about the
> evolution of whales, and what does he claim about that evolution?

No, he is talking about devolution being recognized as real. He referenced research that included whales. The only claim he makes about whales is "That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long. "

>
> QUOTE from above:
> Not only is devolution the dominant mode in microevolution we observe in
> real time in lab experiments today, but also in the macroevolutionary
> change that we infer from genome sequences over geological ages —
> punctuated by bursts of new information.
> END QUOTE:

The word "whale" does not appear in that quote. You're quite mad.
>
snip more of your insanity.

[Glenn]

Nope. "Several new papers have appeared that reinforce key points of my recent book"

That does not support your claim that Behe referred to whale evolution in his book, nor is whale evolution a "key point" for Behe.

You're lying.

[jillery]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 18:37:45 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>Like jillery, you make shit up all the time.

You lie compulsively all the time, but you're allowed because you have
no idea what you're talking about and are proud of it.

[jillery]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 14:34:41 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>That's a strawman.


You have no idea what you're talking about and are proud of it.

[jillery]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 17:41:09 -0500, RonO <roki...@cox.net> wrote:

[...]

Thank you for actually citing something Behe actually wrote about
whale evolution. In your cited article, Behe appears to refer to the
same paper as did one of the Uncommondescent articles I found.
Unfortunately, the link to that paper in both of these articles are
broken, so I still have no way to know if that paper says whether they
found any novel genes, or even if they tried to find any novel genes.

My criticism of Behe's article you cited is the same as to the
Uncommon Descent article I cited, that changing a terrestrial mammal
to a marine mammal would necessarily involves both extant gene loss
and novel gene gain. And Behe counts functional change as
"devolution". So not only is Behe cherrypicking the data, his
argument is at best incoherent.

[Glenn]

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw6671
>

[RonO]

What an IDiot. It is expected by Darwinian means. That is the point
that Behe is making. He is denigrating the type of evolution that he
expects from natural processes. He understands that it is still
evolution. The example was whales, and the devolution was from land
mammals. Denial of this magnitude is stupid.

>
>
>>
>> Denial is really stupid. The article cited was written by Behe. The
>> quoted material is what he wrote. Behe is obviously talking about the
>> evolution of whales, and what does he claim about that evolution?
>
> No, he is talking about devolution being recognized as real. He referenced research that included whales. The only claim he makes about whales is "That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long. "

If whales are included and are the specific example that he talks about
how can you deny that he is talking about whale evolution?

>>
>> QUOTE from above:
>> Not only is devolution the dominant mode in microevolution we observe in
>> real time in lab experiments today, but also in the macroevolutionary
>> change that we infer from genome sequences over geological ages —
>> punctuated by bursts of new information.
>> END QUOTE:
>
> The word "whale" does not appear in that quote. You're quite mad.
>>
> snip more of your insanity.
>

The whole section is about the whale example. Denial of this magnitude
is worse than stupid. What was the section that the quates came from
about? What are the pictures in the article?

Lying to yourself about this is not going to change reality. Behe wrote
this article. The pictures are cetaceans (dolphins). The section that
the quotes came from is about a paper on what they found in whale
genomes. How can Behe not be talking about whales?

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

You are just lying to yourself. What part of the book do other
creationists talk about (the whale part, that link is somewhere from
uncommon descent). Behe wrote the cited article that you lie to
yourself about. The pictures used were cetacean pictures. The paper
specifically talked about was about whale genome comparisons. Lying to
yourself is not going to change reality.

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

Behe was only interested in the gene loss and loss of function
mutations. There are obviously a lot of mutations in genes where whales
differ from land mammals, but who knows what they do? We differ from
chimps in gene sequences, but we have a lot to do in order to figure out
which changes make us what we are. Behe was cherry picking the data,
but so where the authors of the paper. They put up the obvious changes
that they could interpret by what we knew about those genes. Most of
the genome could not be interpreted in that way. We don't know what a
lot (the majority?) of genes do, yet, so we don't know if their
functions change, and if they could have been selected for some reason.
There are gain in function mutations that have been identified in
human genetics, but they are usually identified because the new function
has a deleterious effect and was detected in that way. As Behe claims
we expect loss of function mutations to be more common than gain in
function, but most of both types of mutations are going to be bad for
the organism. In some environments they might be selected for.

As others have pointed out Behe is likely wrong about his extreme
devolution notions, but as Behe understands it is still evolution. He
just denigrates it in order to cast a shadow on what he calls Darwinian
evolution, but doesn't deny and even claims that it is Darwinian
evolution. It is the type of evolution that Behe expects to occur under
natural conditions.

Ron Okimoto

[Mark Isaak]

First, because the point of discussion of your discussion with Burkard
included intelligent design, not just ID. Second, because my answer can
also apply to ID, if God is the breeder. The only reason why ID (the
ideological movement) is incompatible with evolution is because they
define themselves to be anti-evolution.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred
to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett

[jillery]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2021 08:28:45 -0700, Mark Isaak

WRT to your point first, I acknowledge Burkhard mentioned GMOs, which
are legitimate examples of intelligent design. However, I remain
unconvinced GMOs have anything to do with Common Descent or Behe's
understanding of evolution, a point I thought I made very clear in my
post to which you reply, and elsethread.

WRT to your point second, if God, or any intelligent Designer of
unspecified and supernatural abilities, is the breeder, then the
entire concept of evolution by unguided natural processes is
meaningless.

I acknowledge it's possible God could have deliberately arranged
things to look like evolution happened by unguided natural processes,
but that's a distinction impossible to demonstrate. And either way,
science would continue to research the natural history of life exactly
the same way.

I acknowledge it's possible God intervenes only occasionally, but then
science would be faced with additional challenges, of identifying
those features of life which happened by God and which happened by
unguided natural processes, *and* of identifying the origin, evolution
and nature of God. To the degree that evolution explains much of the
natural history of life without invoking God, to that same degree
those challenges are artifacts of what's called an unnecessary actor.
WRT to your assertion, that the incompatibility of evolution and ID is
strictly a matter of definition, I could not disagree more. Apart
from the exception I noted above, the two premises predict very
different outcomes for the natural history of life.

I identified one hypothetical example, of a preCambrian rabbit. I
acknowledge it's theoretically possible rabbits could have evolved in
the preCambrian. But if they did, their evolution would have left a
trail of fossil and genetic evidence. OTOH if God genetically
engineered preCambrian rabbits, they would appear de novo, without
evolutionary and genetic precursors, just as did Glofish and oncomice.

Cdesign proponentsists claim evolution doesn't explain adequately the
origins of novel biological features. In counterpoint, I submit that
their presumptive Designer doesn't explain anything. If novel
biological features were created by purposeful Designer, there would
be zero evidence of their origins. Contrast that with for example the
evidence of the evolution of mammalian ears over millennia.

[Glenn]

You've been told what Behe actually says and what he doesn't actually say.

Behe is "talkin' bout" devolution, not whale evolution.

But if you insist on claiming Behe is saying that whales evolved from land animals by devolution,
you've a big problem with what he actually says.

"At least 85 changes — and probably many more — were needed for whale evolution. That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long."

"Not only is devolution the dominant mode in microevolution we observe in real time in lab experiments today, but also in the macroevolutionary change that we infer from genome sequences over geological ages — punctuated by bursts of new information. There is no hint of significant, constructive Darwinian molecular changes at any time scale."

https://evolutionnews.org/2019/10/darwin-devolves-evidence-keeps-rolling-in/

Has Behe said or implied that whale evolution did not require "bursts of new information"?

[RonO]

Willful ignorance of this magnitude is insane or dishonest. Which is it
in this case?

The devolution that he is talking about is whale evolution. What are
the pictures of? What is he talking about in the section that the
quotes come from?

>
> But if you insist on claiming Behe is saying that whales evolved from land animals by devolution,
> you've a big problem with what he actually says.

That is exactly what Behe is claiming. He understands that common
descent is a fact of nature, and he is claiming that the evolution of
whales from terrestrial mammals was devolution. Evolution by breaking
things is what he claims can be expected by natural processes.

He denigrates the type of evolution, but he is claiming that, that is
what happened.

This is why you don't see any IDiots talking about this junk much any
more. It was only supposed to allow the rubes like you to lie to
themselves for a bit, and it didn't even do that very well. As sad as
it may be Behe was fooling the rubes into lying to themselves by
demonstrating that whales evolved from land mammals. What genes were
broken, and in what type of ancestor where they not broken? The whole
basis of the argument was that the evolution happened, but it was
"devolution" according to Behe even though it was the transition from
lamd mammal to aquatic mammal.

>
> "At least 85 changes — and probably many more — were needed for whale evolution. That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long."

How stupid can you be. These 85 changes occurred in the 10 million year
period that the transition was taking place. The changes occurred as
whales were evolving from terrestrial mammals. The ancestral
populations may be extinct, but Behe is claiming that those changes did
occur and that they were devolution changes.

>
> "Not only is devolution the dominant mode in microevolution we observe in real time in lab experiments today, but also in the macroevolutionary change that we infer from genome sequences over geological ages — punctuated by bursts of new information. There is no hint of significant, constructive Darwinian molecular changes at any time scale."

And it is what Behe claims is observed in the evolution of whales from
terrestrial mammals. How can you not understand that, when the section
that the quote comes from is talking about the devolution of whales.
The "macroevolutionary change that we infer from genome sequences" is
the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals because those are the
genome sequences that Behe was talking about in that section. Denial
isn't just stupid, but insanely dishonest.

Glenn, look at the quote in context. The genomes that he is inferring
macroevolutionary change from are the whale genomes under discussion in
that section. Why do you think that I quoted that material? How can
you not understand what the quote is saying? You just requoted it, and
it says just what I claim.

>
> https://evolutionnews.org/2019/10/darwin-devolves-evidence-keeps-rolling-in/
>
> Has Behe said or implied that whale evolution did not require "bursts of new information"?
>

Who cares? He claims that devolution can occur. What devolution is he
talking about?

Lying to yourself about this junk is bogously dishonest. I don't even
understand why you are doing it. What was the article about? What
pictures were presented in the article. What was Behe calling
devolution? What genomes were under discussion?

Ron Okimoto

[jillery]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2021 09:54:37 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>On Wednesday, September 8, 2021 at 3:05:08 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:

[...]

>> The whole section is about the whale example. Denial of this magnitude
>> is worse than stupid. What was the section that the quates came from
>> about? What are the pictures in the article?
>>
>> Lying to yourself about this is not going to change reality. Behe wrote
>> this article. The pictures are cetaceans (dolphins). The section that
>> the quotes came from is about a paper on what they found in whale
>> genomes. How can Behe not be talking about whales?
>>
>You've been told what Behe actually says and what he doesn't actually say.
>
>Behe is "talkin' bout" devolution, not whale evolution.
>
>But if you insist on claiming Behe is saying that whales evolved from land animals by devolution,
>you've a big problem with what he actually says.
>
>"At least 85 changes — and probably many more — were needed for whale evolution. That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long."

What part of "were needed for whale evolution" do you not understand?

>"Not only is devolution the dominant mode in microevolution we observe in real time in lab experiments today, but also in the macroevolutionary change that we infer from genome sequences over geological ages — punctuated by bursts of new information. There is no hint of significant, constructive Darwinian molecular changes at any time scale."
>
>https://evolutionnews.org/2019/10/darwin-devolves-evidence-keeps-rolling-in/
>
>Has Behe said or implied that whale evolution did not require "bursts of new information"?

What part of "no hint of significant, constructive Darwinian molecular
changes at any time scale" do you not understand?

[Glenn]

On Thursday, September 9, 2021 at 5:00:08 PM UTC-7, jillery wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Sep 2021 09:54:37 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
> wrote:
> >On Wednesday, September 8, 2021 at 3:05:08 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> [...]
> >> The whole section is about the whale example. Denial of this magnitude
> >> is worse than stupid. What was the section that the quates came from
> >> about? What are the pictures in the article?
> >>
> >> Lying to yourself about this is not going to change reality. Behe wrote
> >> this article. The pictures are cetaceans (dolphins). The section that
> >> the quotes came from is about a paper on what they found in whale
> >> genomes. How can Behe not be talking about whales?
> >>
> >You've been told what Behe actually says and what he doesn't actually say.
> >
> >Behe is "talkin' bout" devolution, not whale evolution.
> >
> >But if you insist on claiming Behe is saying that whales evolved from land animals by devolution,
> >you've a big problem with what he actually says.
> >
> >"At least 85 changes — and probably many more — were needed for whale evolution. That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long."
> What part of "were needed for whale evolution" do you not understand?

Perhaps you believe the same as Ron, but I know you know better, and what Behe has claimed. You're just being dishonest.
What part of Behe's sarcasm do you not understand? Certainly "whale evolution" is not referring to "bursts of *new information*".
Devolution to Behe is not "bursts of new information" and you know it.

> >"Not only is devolution the dominant mode in microevolution we observe in real time in lab experiments today, but also in the macroevolutionary change that we infer from genome sequences over geological ages — punctuated by bursts of new information. There is no hint of significant, constructive Darwinian molecular changes at any time scale."
> >
> >https://evolutionnews.org/2019/10/darwin-devolves-evidence-keeps-rolling-in/
> >
> >Has Behe said or implied that whale evolution did not require "bursts of new information"?
> What part of "no hint of significant, constructive Darwinian molecular
> changes at any time scale" do you not understand?
> --

What part do you not understand? I'm sure you do understand. Behe has made it known that he thinks "constructive Darwinian molecular changes" never occurs, and that the Intelligent Designer steps in with "bursts of new information" somewhere around the Family or Order level, which is whales.

Again, you lie all the time.

[jillery]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2021 20:33:19 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>

So when you don't comprehend what Behe actually said, and what he said
disproves what you said he said, I'm lying. No wonder you spam that I
lie all the time, what your fellow pseudoskeptics call "sarcasm".

[Glenn]

In your twisted mind, who do you think might be convinced of this?

[jillery]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2021 07:29:41 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>

Your "this" is ambiguous. Who do you think might share your lack of
reading comprehension?

[Glenn]

So you label what you said as ambiguous. I disagree. Who do you think might share your affinity for self-deprecation?

[jillery]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2021 13:39:06 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>

Q: What part of "your "this" is ambiguous" do you not understand?
A: All of it.

[Glenn]

Do you use a clear crystal ball, or one with bubbles?