Dembski's latest tap dance
Wedge Buster
STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
When I read Ken Miller's contribution to the volume I'm editing with
Michael Ruse (Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming 2004), I expected I'd have till the
actual publication date next year to respond to it. But since Miller's
contribution has now officially appeared on his website
(http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html -- it is
titled "The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of 'Irreducible
Complexity'"), I want to comment on it at this time. I'll go through
Miller's paper sequentially and respond bullet-point fashion:
The Argument from Personal Incredulity:
Miller claims that the problem with anti-evolutionists like Michael
Behe and me is a failure of imagination -- that we personally cannot
"imagine how evolutionary mechanisms might have produced a certain
species, organ, or structure." He then emphasizes that such claims are
"personal," merely pointing up the limitations of those who make them.
Let's get real. The problem is not that we in the intelligent design
community, whom Miller incorrectly calls "anti-evolutionists," just
can't imagine how those systems arose. The problem is that Ken Miller
and the entire biological community haven't figured out how those
systems arose. It's not a question of personal incredulity but of
global disciplinary failure (the discipline here being biology) and
gross theoretical inadequacy (the theory here being Darwin's).
Darwin's theory, without which nothing in biology is supposed to make
sense, in fact offers no insight into how the flagellum arose. If the
biological community had even an inkling of how such systems arose by
naturalistic mechanisms, Miller would not -- a full six years after
the publication of Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe -- be lamely
gesturing at the type three secretory system as a possible
evolutionary precursor to the flagellum. It would suffice simply to
provide a detailed explanation of how a system like the bacterial
flagellum arose by Darwinian means. Miller's paper, despite its
intimidating title ("The Flagellum Unspun") does nothing to answer
that question.
Getting from Irreducible Complexity to Design:
Miller, in line with his personal incredulity criticism, charges
design proponents of reasoning directly from the premise "Shucks, no
one has figured out how the flagellum arose" to the conclusion "Gee,
it must have been designed." Miller, despite a long exposure to ID
thinkers and their writings, continually misses a crucial connecting
link in the argument. So let me spell out the premises of the argument
as well as its conclusion: Certain biological systems have a feature,
call it IC (irreducible complexity). Darwinians don't have a clue how
biological systems with that feature originated (Miller disputes this
premise, but we'll come back to it). We know that intelligent agency
has the causal power to produce systems that exhibit IC (e.g., many
human artifacts exhibit IC). Therefore, biological systems that
exhibit IC are likely to be designed. Design theorists, in attributing
design to systems that exhibit IC, are simply doing what scientists do
generally, which is to attempt to formulate a causally adequate
explanation of the phenomenon in question.
Irreducible Complexity Is Not Properly Ascribed to the Bacterial
Flagellum:
According to Miller, Behe's claim that the bacterial flagellum is
irreducibly complex is false. If Miller is right, then Behe and the
intelligent design movement are in deep trouble. Think of it: Behe
goes to all this bother to formulate some feature of biochemical
systems that is a clear marker of intelligent agency and that
decisively precludes the Darwinian mechanism. Behe then asserts that
the bacterial flagellum exhibits that feature. Rather than argue about
whether that feature reliably signals design or effectively precludes
Darwinism, Miller claims to show that when it comes to the design
community's best example of irreducible complexity -- the bacterial
flagellum -- that it isn't even irreducibly complex. What idiots these
design theorists must be if they can't even apply correctly the very
concepts they've defined!
etc. etc. ...
TomS
<d1abe9ac.0302...@posting.google.com>, wedge...@hotmail.com
stated..."
>
>http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm
>
>STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
>By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
>Let's get real. The problem is not that we in the intelligent design
>community, whom Miller incorrectly calls "anti-evolutionists," just
OK, so we're not supposed to say "creationists", and now we're
not supposed to say "anti-evolutionists".
What are we supposed to say, "evolution challenged"? "Differently
designed"?
Tom S.
Hiero5ant
"TomS" <TomS_...@newsguy.com> wrote in message
news:b2t4c...@drn.newsguy.com...
"Irreducibly Cement-headed"? "Crypro-theist-American"?
Chris Ho-Stuart
IDiots?
TomS
<3e52...@news.qut.edu.au>, Chris stated..."
If it weren't for their desire not to be taken as advocating
that the "intelligent designers" are objects of worship, one might
consider "IDolaters". Perhaps a Roman Catholic might think of some
version of "IDodulia".
Tom S.
Lilith
> http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm
>
> STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
> By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
When it comes down to it, Dembski is trying to argue (using his
analogy of travel) that if you look through an Los Angeles phone book,
and find a Bostonian friend (with an odd name, so you know it's her)
now living in LA, then the theory that the Bostonian friend got to LA
through air, rail, car or bus is completely invalid since you can't
prove it that she actually TRAVELLED from Boston to LA. You can't
prove she travelled from Boston to LA through the normal incremental
means, since you haven't talked to her yet, so therefore you have to
accept all possibilities of how she got to LA.
In fact, since, before talking to this friend, you have to assume all
possibilities of her getting to LA are valid, you MUST assume
miraculous means...you must assume she's landed in LA by a star-trek
transporter mechanism until you can PROVE, drawing a mile-by-mile,
blow-by-blow description down to the last detail, that she did indeed
travel from Boston to LA and at no time was she instantly transported
from one site to another. That's EXACTLY what Dembski and the ID'ers
are doing. They're insisting they want mile-by-mile proof. Heck, even
insisting on city-by-city proof is pretty goofy. We've spent time
documenting the travel from Boston to LA for lots of other people, why
is this one person any different? Because if she DID suddenly up and
transport to LA, that would be SOMETHING, wouldn't it? Impossible by
the laws of physics, yea, but it would sell a lot of books.
I don't get why this point is being argued by the ID'ers. We have
plenty of evidence that many people who move from Boston to LA crossed
the space inbetween. Except for that selling books part. Yea, and all
those famous folks who are naturally ignorant of the fact that the
biological equivalents of air, rail, bus and cars make a heck of a lot
more sense than "beam me up, Scotty!".
To bring it back to evolution, we have several examples of how
evolution goes from state A to state B, either through morphology
(body) changes, or molecular changes (gene duplication). Miller spends
some time outlining them.
Behe/Dembski using the flagellum to pick on Darwinism is like picking
on our one Bostonian friend and insisting that we must accept that she
transported to LA magically, instead of by normal, space-crossing,
incremental means, since we don't have her plane ticket yet, or her
bus ticket, or her car log....and since we cannot be SURE that instant
transportation does not exist, we must accept our lack of proof of our
freind's travel as proof that instant transportation must exist.
Ah, wonders never cease.
Adam Marczyk
news:d1abe9ac.0302...@posting.google.com...
> http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm
>
> STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
> By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
>
>
> When I read Ken Miller's contribution to the volume I'm editing with
> Michael Ruse (Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Cambridge
> University Press, forthcoming 2004), I expected I'd have till the
> actual publication date next year to respond to it. But since Miller's
> contribution has now officially appeared on his website
> (http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html -- it is
> titled "The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of 'Irreducible
> Complexity'"), I want to comment on it at this time. I'll go through
> Miller's paper sequentially and respond bullet-point fashion:
[...]
The blatant hypocrisy of IDists like Dembski continues to amaze me. (If I
read the article right, Behe is now arguing that it's illegitimate to prove
an IC system might have evolved by showing that a subset of its parts could
have a different function.) "Since you don't know the exact details of how
this evolved, it is therefore impossible that it could have evolved, and
therefore *our* model, which provides not a single detail whatsoever, must
be the correct one!" I mean, come on - these are *elementary* logical
fallacies they're using. Reading an ID argument is like reading an example
paragraph taken out of a book for a high-school-level critical thinking
class. Do these people have no shame at all? Where do they get the chutzpah
to denounce evolution for not providing a detailed, step-by-step,
gene-by-gene testable model for the evolution of a particular biochemical
system, when they advocate an alternative that has yet to provide a
*single* testable detail about the development of *anything*? Some (I among
them) might go so far as to say that ID is a hypothesis which could not
provide such detail even in principle. Certainly, if there is a way for ID
to extract such history, its advocates haven't even begun to hint at what
it is. Instead they've been spending 100% of their time taking wild swings
at evolution. This is not the behavior of scientists; it's the behavior of
politicians and public relations firms, if anything.
--
a.a. #2001
"We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."
--Tombstone epitaph of two amateur astronomers,
quoted in Carl Sagan's _Cosmos_
http://www.ebonmusings.org ICQ: 8777843 PGP Key ID: 0x5C66F737
John Wilkins
I get 5c every time someone uses that word, in royalties.
--
John Wilkins
"Listen to your heart, not the voices in your head" - Marge Simpson
Bobby D. Bryant
> Some (I among them) might go so far as to say that ID is a hypothesis
> which could not provide such detail even in principle.
ID isn't a hypothesis; it's a political stratagem.
> Certainly, if there is a way for ID to extract such history, its
> advocates haven't even begun to hint at what it is. Instead they've been
> spending 100% of their time taking wild swings at evolution. This is not
> the behavior of scientists; it's the behavior of politicians and public
> relations firms, if anything.
Your evidence supports my analysis.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
Ron Okimoto
John Wilkins wrote:
> Chris Ho-Stuart <host...@sky.fit.qut.edu.au> wrote:
>
> > Hiero5ant <alri...@bu.treet.edu> wrote:
> > IDiots?
>
> I get 5c every time someone uses that word, in royalties.
Gees, I must owe at least a dollar to the beer fund.
Ron Okimoto
Steven Carr
>
> STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
> By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
> So let me spell out the premises of the argument
> as well as its conclusion: Certain biological systems have a feature,
> call it IC (irreducible complexity). Darwinians don't have a clue how
> biological systems with that feature originated (Miller disputes this
> premise, but we'll come back to it). We know that intelligent agency
> has the causal power to produce systems that exhibit IC (e.g., many
> human artifacts exhibit IC). Therefore, biological systems that
> exhibit IC are likely to be designed.
Is Dembski really saying that all he has to offer is a non-sequitor
based on
an argument from analogy that presumes the very thing he is trying to
show?
His argument seems to be
1) All A are B (All flagella are IC)
2) Some C are B (Some designed objects are IC)
Therefore some A are C (Some flagella are designed)
An incredible blunder for such a clever person (just ask Dembski and
he will tell you that he has 2 Phds) to make.
Of course, his 'don't have a clue' translates to saying that we don't
have a time machine to go back and reproduce every bacterium, and show
how each and every step was advantageous.
<skip>
Andy Groves
> wedge...@hotmail.com (Wedge Buster) wrote in message news:<d1abe9ac.0302...@posting.google.com>...
> > http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm
> >
> > STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
> > By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
>
> When it comes down to it, Dembski is trying to argue (using his
> analogy of travel) that if you look through an Los Angeles phone book,
> and find a Bostonian friend (with an odd name, so you know it's her)
> now living in LA, then the theory that the Bostonian friend got to LA
> through air, rail, car or bus is completely invalid since you can't
> prove it that she actually TRAVELLED from Boston to LA.
<snip>
I posted the following on he ISCID Brainstorms page about 6 months
ago, and it could do with another airing. I was replying to a comment
made by Paul Nelson along the same lines as Dembski's. Amazingly, the
moderator let it pass without comment....
==================
Paul's analogy is actually based on a true-life encounter that took
place on the patio of The Panda's Thumb, the most popular watering
hole of the University of Ediacara. This is the sort of place where no
turn is left unstoned in the search for man's origins. Anyhow, the
conversation went something like this:
Paul: Hey Andy, look!
Andy: (grunts) Hang on, let me put down my beer. (Sound of beer keg
hitting the floor). Whassup?
Paul: Richard Dawkins is sitting on top of that chimney again.
Andy: Oh no. How did he get up there this time.
Paul: The ghost of Stephen Jay Gould put him there.
Andy: What??? Don't be ridiculous!
Paul: I'm serious - the ghost of Stephen Jay Gould put him there.
Andy: And I thought *I* had been drinking heavily! Look, Richard
climbs that chimney all the time. You know what happens on Fridays -
he stays in to watch his favourite TV drama "Touched by a Secular
Humanist", and then he comes down the Thumb, gets a few scoops inside
him and climbs the chimney. We've seen it all before.
Paul: No one has evidence that Dawkins climbed the chimney.
Andy: What do you mean? How else did he get there?
Paul: Simple. The ghost of Stephen Jay Gould put him there.
Andy: **Sigh**. Look. We know that evolutionary biologists, especially
philosophical naturalists like Dawkins are always climbing chimneys.
It's just what they do.
Paul: Right.
Andy: Right. So that's how he got up there today.
Paul: Prove it.
Andy: Look - Theodosius over there saw him halfway up ten minutes ago.
Right Theo?
Theo: **Burp**. Oops, sorry. Yeah, right.
Paul: Yeah right indeed! So how did he get halfway?
Andy: Well, he climbed.
Paul: No he didn't. The ghost of Stephen Jay Gould put him halfway up
the chimney..
Andy: Hang on a minute. Garcon! Another barrel of the Burgess Shale
Brown Ale please! Now where was I? Oh, yes?. Dr. Doolittle took some
pictures of him climbing. Where is he? Russell? Oh, he's over in the
corner talking to the Aquatic Ape again......
Doolittle: It's true! I was trying out my new Pentax, and I have a few
snapshots of him four, eight and twelve feet off the ground.
Paul: Pah! So what?
Andy: What do you mean, so what?
Paul: How do you know he climbed between four and eight feet?
Andy: Look. We know Dawkins climbs chimneys when he gets drunk. Theo
saw him halfway up the chimney. Russ has some snapshots of him getting
to halfway. And you're saying that.....
Paul: ...that the ghost of Stephen Jay Gould moved him from four to
eight feet..
Andy: Oh brother. We're getting into one of those Stephen Jay Gould of
the gaps arguments again, aren't we?
Paul: Well actually, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather not get
into whether it was the ghost of Stephen Jay Gould or not. I think the
identity of the entity that put Richard Dawkins on top of the chimney
is irrelevant to the discussion.
Andy: You just want to say that.......
Paul: ....that some unknown entity put him on top of the chimney,
yes.
Andy: And aren't you a little bit curious about exactly how that
happened?
Paul: Nope.
Andy: You don't care whether it used a crane?
Paul: Nope?
Andy: Or a helicopter?
Paul: Nope.
Andy: All that matters to you is the fact that some entity put Richard
Dawkins on top of the chimney.
Paul: Well, I'm actually hoping this will open up a whole new field of
chimney-placement investigation.
Andy: Sheesh.
(silence, punctuated by thoughtful burping)
Paul: And that's another thing.
Andy: What.
Paul: You were spawned in a vat.
Andy: WHAT????
Paul: Well, not you. Your great-great granddaddy.
Andy: You've been eating too many of the pickled amphioxus, haven't
you? What on earth are you talking about?
Paul: Who's your daddy?
Andy: Colin.
Paul: And your granddaddy?
Andy: Arthur.
Paul: And your great-granddaddy?
Andy: Charles.
Paul: And your great-great granddaddy?
Andy: I don't know?.
Paul (in the manner of one making a clinching argument): AHA!!! See?
Andy: What?
Paul: Your great-great granddaddy was spawned in a vat.
Andy: You have absolutely no evidence to suggest that.
Paul: Look. You can't trace you family tree back to your great-great
granddaddy. Ergo, he was spawned in a vat.
Andy: This is ridiculous. There's no record of people being spawned in
a vat, with the possible exception of Jerry Falwell and Cher. Besides,
many people have better family trees than mine.
Paul: As my friend Bill would say, the evidence of your family tree is
pathetic. Face it, vat-boy, you were spawned. Stands to reason.
Andy: And who spawned my great-great granddaddy in a vat, then?
Paul: I'm not getting into that with you.
Andy: It wasn't the ghost of Stephen Jay Gould, was it?
THE END
TomS
<991ea4ae.0302...@posting.google.com>, gro...@cco.caltech.edu
stated..."
What is really fascinating is that no less an ID-advocate
than Michael Behe used a similar analogy, in all seriousness:
"Darwin's Black Box", Free Press, 1996, pages 13-14:
`Suppose a 4-foot-wide ditch in your backyard, running
to the horizon in both directions, separates your property from that
of your neighbor. If one day you met him in your yard and asked how
he got there, you would have no reason to doubt the answer, "I jumped
over the ditch." ... If the "ditch" were actually a canyon 1000 feet
wide, however, you would not entertain for a moment the bald
assertion that he jumped across.'
Tom S.
Bobby D. Bryant
> [...snip remainder of amusing "true-life encounter"...]
>
> What is really fascinating is that no less an ID-advocate
> than Michael Behe used a similar analogy, in all seriousness:
>
> "Darwin's Black Box", Free Press, 1996, pages 13-14:
> `Suppose a 4-foot-wide ditch in your backyard, running to the horizon
> in both directions, separates your property from that of your neighbor.
> If one day you met him in your yard and asked how he got there, you
> would have no reason to doubt the answer, "I jumped over the ditch."
> ... If the "ditch" were actually a canyon 1000 feet wide, however, you
> would not entertain for a moment the bald assertion that he jumped
> across.'
Don't you just love arguments based on hypothetical evidence!
Jeff Stubbs
<ad...@deletethis.ebonmusings.org> wrote:
</lurk>
I'm still over my head in some ot these threads, but what do you expect
from an "average joe sixpack". But these IDiots are not making the case
to an average, science literate layman. Even I can see the tap dance.
Even more telling, a friend of mine, who describes himself as a
fundamentalist (though in private, he'll admit he's an OEC), actually
read Demski's NFL. His impression, Demski was snowing him through out
most of the book and his conclusion didn't follow from his arguments. I
know it's just hearsay, but.......
Maybe all of us laymen are supposed to be impressed with his two Ph.Ds
Jeff
<lurk>
--
People who want to share their religious views with you
almost never want you to share yours with them.
Mark VandeWettering
The unbridled idiocy of this analogy is so great that it actually comes
close to _angering_ me. Three things leap out with merely a picosecond's
worth of consideration:
1. The "canyon" only appears 1000 feet across. In fact, it is actually
dotted with stepping stones. The arrangement is confusing, and some of
the stones that your neighbor stepped on may in fact have broken off or
weathered away on his trip.
2. Perhaps you can't even reconstruct the exact path that your neighbor
took. But Behe would have you believe that if you can't produce the
exact path, then you must entertain (or even _prefer_) the idea that
some supernatural process must be at work, transporting your neighbor
across the perceived gap. In essence, your own inability to construct
the precise path means that he must have just magically appeared across
the divide.
3. Lastly, it is _just_ an analogy. Behe hasn't measured the canyon.
He hasn't illustrated any huge gaps that evolution can't cross. He hasn't
presented any reasoning that such gaps should exist. He tries really
hard with the whole IC argument, but it's a complete bust. It's purely
subjective in its definition, and as such is unlikely to tell us anything
objective about the "systems" under consideration. It's also just plain
wrong in that it ignores the idea that evolution can preempt the functions
of existing systems and use them for other purposes, as well as the fact
that evolution can result in _simpler_ as well as more complex systems.
He's a fraud.
Mark
Noctiluca
>
> STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
> By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
>
This caught my eye,
> Design theorists, in attributing
> design to systems that exhibit IC, are simply doing what scientists do
> generally, which is to attempt to formulate a causally adequate
> explanation of the phenomenon in question.
Wouldn't a "causally adequate explanation" include an adequately
demonstrable cause? Don't most scientists propose as a cause something
for which there is at least a shred of evidence?
> <snip>
Ward M. Clark
Rusty Ryan
> > By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
> >
> >
> > When I read Ken Miller's contribution to the volume I'm editing with
> > Michael Ruse (Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Cambridge
> > University Press, forthcoming 2004), I expected I'd have till the
> > actual publication date next year to respond to it. But since Miller's
> > contribution has now officially appeared on his website
> > (http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html -- it is
> > titled "The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of 'Irreducible
> > Complexity'"), I want to comment on it at this time. I'll go through
> > Miller's paper sequentially and respond bullet-point fashion:
>
> [...]
>
> The blatant hypocrisy of IDists like Dembski continues to amaze me. (If I
> read the article right, Behe is now arguing that it's illegitimate to prove
> an IC system might have evolved by showing that a subset of its parts could
> have a different function.) "Since you don't know the exact details of how
> this evolved, it is therefore impossible that it could have evolved, and
> therefore *our* model, which provides not a single detail whatsoever, must
> be the correct one!" I mean, come on - these are *elementary* logical
> fallacies they're using.
(snip rest)
I thought the same thing when I first read this (not very clear) quote
from Behe. It seemed particularly ludicrous that he was trying to
brush off potential evolutionary intermediates to the flagellum
because they had different functions from the flagellum (which, in
fact, is exactly what evolutionary theory would predict.)
On a second reading, it seems that he is instead arguing that the
components which make up the protein-export pathway of the flagellum
have nothing to do with the motor part of the flagellum, and
presumably, the flagellum would work just fine without them (though it
might have a hard time putting itself together). Thus, the TTSS isn't
a viable intermediate for his "irreducable complex system," because
the "system" he is referring to is the motor part of the flagellum,
not the protein export part.
Of course, this is a major goalpost shift, since all along he has
referred to how many proteins are needed to make up the total
flagellum - not just the critical motor componants - in demonstrating
how hard it would be for the flagellum to evolve. Furthermore, the few
papers I have found on the subject refer to the critical motor
proteins being MotA and MotB (which form the cation channels and the
stable part of the motor - these have no homologs in the TTSS) and
FliG, FliM, and FliN, which are the parts of the spinning rotor that
the Mot proteins interact with. Of those, FliG and FliN *do* have
homologs in the TTSS, as do many more of the proteins in the rotor.
Thus, the TTSS is not, as Behe implies, merely homologous to some
accessory part of the flagellum unrelated to motor function. It can
and should be considered a potential intermediate to the motor parts
of the flagellum (or at least an example of what function a true
intermediate might have had). Since I'm no expert, I'd love to hear
the take of someone with more experience in this area.
Journal of Bacteriology, May 2002, p. 2429-2438, Vol. 184, No. 9
0021-9193/02/$04.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JB.184.9.2429-2438.2002
Copyright © 2002, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights
Reserved.
Rhodospirillum centenum Utilizes Separate Motor and Switch Components
To Control Lateral and Polar Flagellum Rotation
Jonathan McClain,, [{dagger}] David R. Rollo, Brenda G. Rushing,,
[{ddagger}] and Carl E. Bauer
Microbiol Mol Biol Rev, June 1998, p. 379-433, Vol. 62, No. 2
1092-2172/98/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1998, American Society for Microbiology. All rights
reserved.
Type III Protein Secretion Systems in Bacterial Pathogens of Animals
and Plants
Christoph J. Hueck*
Rusty Ryan
"If nothing else, one has to admire the breathtaking audacity of
verbally trying to turn another severe problem for Darwinism into an
advantage. In recent years it has been shown that the bacterial
flagellum is an even more sophisticated system than had been thought.
Not only does it act as a rotary propulsion device, it also contains
within itself an elegant mechanism to transport the proteins that make
up the outer portion of the machine, from the inside of the cell to
the outside. (Aizawa 1996) Without blinking, Miller asserted that the
flagellum is not irreducibly complex because some proteins of the
flagellum could be missing and the remainder could still transport
proteins, perhaps independently. (Proteins similar -- but not
identical -- to some found in the flagellum occur in the type III
secretory system of some bacteria. See Hueck 1998). Again he was
equivocating, switching the focus from the function of the system to
act as a rotary propulsion machine to the ability of a subset of the
system to transport proteins across a membrane. However, taking away
the parts of the flagellum certainly destroys the ability of the
system to act as a rotary propulsion machine, as I have argued. Thus,
contra Miller, the flagellum is indeed irreducibly complex. What's
more, the function of transporting proteins has as little directly to
do with the function of rotary propulsion as a toothpick has to do
with a mousetrap. So discovering the supportive function of
transporting proteins tells us precisely nothing about how Darwinian
processes might have put together a rotary propulsion machine."
TomS
<slrnb55pcu.1...@keck.vandewettering.net>, Mark stated..."
#2 is what sprung to my mind when first reading this passage.
I'm reminded of "Car Talk" (a weekly program on USA National
Public Radio). The two brothers who provide the solutions for the
call-in problems about cars sometimes briefly consider demonic
possession as an explanation. But I don't think that they ever
*seriously* consider it. And I think that it would be beyond
humor, to being merely incomprehensible, if they were to close the
problem with, "Your car is behaving that way because of intelligent
design."
Tom S.
Von Smith
This pretty much confirms that Behe does not understand, or want to
understand, evolutionary theories even to the extent that an attentive
liberal arts major like myself does: if IC merely means that
hypothetical precursor systems can't all have served the same function
as the present systems, then of course most if not all structures are
"IC". No one is proposing that the dinosaur forelimbs from which bird
wings evolved were capable of powered flight, or that Pakicetus had
balenes. Or that the single-celled organisms from which we evolved
had color-vision like ours. The possibility of acquiring new
functions that have as much to do with the old ones "as a toothpick
has to do with a mousetrap" by modifying existing structures is part
of the point.
Sheesh
Von Smith
Fortuna nimis dat multis, satis nulli.
howard hershey
>
> "If nothing else, one has to admire the breathtaking audacity of
> verbally trying to turn another severe problem for Darwinism into an
> advantage. In recent years it has been shown that the bacterial
> flagellum is an even more sophisticated system than had been thought.
> Not only does it act as a rotary propulsion device, it also contains
> within itself an elegant mechanism to transport the proteins that make
> up the outer portion of the machine, from the inside of the cell to
> the outside.
Hmmmm. Then "the flagella" seems to have at least two functions, "act
as a rotary propulsion device" and "transport the proteins".
> (Aizawa 1996) Without blinking, Miller asserted that the
> flagellum is not irreducibly complex because some proteins of the
> flagellum could be missing and the remainder could still transport
> proteins, perhaps independently. (Proteins similar -- but not
> identical -- to some found in the flagellum occur in the type III
> secretory system of some bacteria. See Hueck 1998).
Yes. Miller is not 'asserting' that, though. It is a fact that some
proteins can be missing and the other function of the flagella will
continue. And that this 'function' of the flagella is a consequence
of a subsystem of the flagella and that this 'function' has been
appropriated (probably secondarily in modern organisms) for that
purpose.
> Again he was
> equivocating, switching the focus from the function of the system to
> act as a rotary propulsion machine to the ability of a subset of the
> system to transport proteins across a membrane.
If Behe agrees that both are 'functions' of flagella, how can he
sensibly argue that one cannot independently acquire a subsystem that
has, as its primary function, protein transport when it is clear that
some organisms have derived subsystems that do just that? Behe wants
his cake and to eat it too. He is the one who is equivokating, by
agreeing that protein transport activity is 'an important useful
function' of the bacterial flagella when it is used to construct one,
but ceases to become a 'useful function' when it is not used to
construct a flagella, but is only used to transport proteins useful to
the bacteria. He cannot simultaneously claim that the same 'function'
is an important part of the flagella's formation and irrelevant when
not used to construct a flagella without being shown up as an
equivocator (or someone who believes he can divine teleologic
purpose).
> However, taking away
> the parts of the flagellum certainly destroys the ability of the
> system to act as a rotary propulsion machine, as I have argued.
But it does mean that loss of a part of a flagellum does not
necessarily destroy all selectable function. In particular, removal of
some parts does not completely destroy the protein transport function.
[It should be held in mind that even the completed bacterial
flagellum, in some organisms, also acts as a protein transport
mechanism.] And, as was known even when Behe wrote his book, if he
had actually read some of the sources he quote-mined, the
developmental schema for the self-assembly of eubacterial (archae
flagella have a different type of flagella, using a derived imported
eubacterial pilin) flagella points to selection first of all for the
protein transport mechanism, with rotory motion being an emergent
property that could be secondarily selected for.
Of course, as a geneticist, I reject the whole idea that mutational
knock-out of a part in a present-day system or pathway that knocks out
the current end result of the pathway tells you that the mechanism of
construction of all pathways involve the random assembly of completely
useless parts until they just happen to come together to perform their
current function (the peculiar strawman version of evolution that Behe
and Dembski assert). First of all, such an idea (gene knock-out as
the IC test) has technical problems, since many biochemical and
developmental pathways exhibit a crude form of homeostasis and a
number of genes have duplicates or close cousins that can (at least
partially) restore activitiy and knocking out a gene does not
necessarily prevent the pathway from producing something similar to
the normal outcome. The whole idea of searching for enhancers and
suppressors of mutations that cause a dramatic effect is built on the
idea that biological systems and developmental pathways are often
semi-redundant and sloppy. And any biologist (which neither Dembski
nor Behe are, and Behe isn't even that good a biochemist) worth his or
her pay would understand that biological systems are often composed of
sub-systems that may various proportions of primary and secondary
functions and may utilize the same system differently in different
contexts.
The teleological claim (for that is what it is) that the only function
for which any part of the bacterial flagella was ever designed or used
was motility is just that, an _a priori_ assignment of the end goal as
'the only function'.
> Thus,
> contra Miller, the flagellum is indeed irreducibly complex. What's
> more, the function of transporting proteins has as little directly to
> do with the function of rotary propulsion as a toothpick has to do
> with a mousetrap.
That the early (and many later) steps in the self-assembly of flagella
are protein transport steps and that rotary motion is only a late
emergent property (and that protein transport remains a secondary
function of even flagella that have rotary motion as a primary
function) tells us that the flagella probably evolved under selection
for the protein transport function. The transport of proteins is the
direct precursor, both developmentally today and almost certainly
evolutionarily, to generating the current function of the flagellum.
Protein transport has everything to do with the function of the
flagellum as a rotory propulsion device.
> So discovering the supportive function of
> transporting proteins tells us precisely nothing about how Darwinian
> processes might have put together a rotary propulsion machine."
Sure it does. It tells us that the rotary propulsion *function* was a
late additional function added to a system that had a different
primary function. Like many other systems, the bacterial flagella has
more than one current function. Today, the primary function seems to
be the rotary propulsion function and the protein transport function
is developmentally important to the formation of the flagella.
Flagella differ, however, in the *extent* to which the end product
functions solely as a rotary propulsion mechanism and (secondarily or
primarily) functions as a protein transport device. That is, rotary
propulsion and protein transport can vary *quantitatively*. Is it so
hard to imagine a protein transport device that has a small (but
selectively relevant) secondary ability to act as a rotary propulsion
device?
But even at best, this means that one cannot use *all* the proteins
involved in flagella formation as the 'units' which must, in Behe's
and Dembski's strawman 747-in-a-tornado version of evolution, randomly
come together after arising in a purely functionally useless state.
Rather, one must consider those proteins involved in protein transport
as an independent *subsystem* that could evolve for entirely different
function.
WRT Dembski's reply,
STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
he must be using the term "spinning" in the sense that advertising
agencies and politicians use it. "Spin" is all they got.
Bobby D. Bryant
> Here is the original Behe quote, for those who are interested:
>
> "[...] In recent years it has been shown that the bacterial flagellum is
an even more sophisticated system than had been thought. [...]"
For The Designer so loved the world
that He gave a bacterium a flagellum,
leaving the important stuff to evolution.
One wonders what _honest_ theologians make of all this.
Dr.GH
John, you will need to split your royalties about a dozen ways I am afraid.
Florian
> wil...@wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote in message news:<1fqmcv5.urhj4p1dvwfqoN%wil...@wehi.edu.au>...
> > Chris Ho-Stuart <host...@sky.fit.qut.edu.au> wrote:
(snip)
> > > IDiots?
> >
> > I get 5c every time someone uses that word, in royalties.
>
> John, you will need to split your royalties about a dozen ways I am
> afraid.
John, his lawyer, your lawyer, and your heirs?
I ceased and desisted when *I* got the notice. I'll be walking again
in just a couple of months!
--
odoratusque est Dominus odorem suavitatis
zosdad
> On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 04:47:53 +0000, Rusty Ryan wrote:
>
> > Here is the original Behe quote, for those who are interested:
> >
> > "[...] In recent years it has been shown that the bacterial flagellum is
> an even more sophisticated system than had been thought. [...]"
>
> For The Designer so loved the world
> that He gave a bacterium a flagellum,
> leaving the important stuff to evolution.
And lo, the bacteria with flagella went forth and multiplied, and when
God created eukaryotes (in separate kinds but for some reason in a
nested hierarchy pattern) some bacteria converted their
oh-so-well-designed flagella into needle-like poison injector
organelles for the purposes of killing eukaryote cells. And Adam
named some of these bacteria Salmonella and Yersinia, the latter also
being known as The Plague or Black Death, and there has been enmity
between Man and bacterium throughout the ages.
>
> One wonders what _honest_ theologians make of all this.
Indeed...
John Wilkins
> gary...@earthlink.net (Dr.GH) writes:
>
> > wil...@wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote...
> > > Chris Ho-Stuart <host...@sky.fit.qut.edu.au> wrote:
> (snip)
> > > > IDiots?
> > >
> > > I get 5c every time someone uses that word, in royalties.
> >
> > John, you will need to split your royalties about a dozen ways I am
> > afraid.
>
> John, his lawyer, your lawyer, and your heirs?
>
> I ceased and desisted when *I* got the notice. I'll be walking again in
> just a couple of months!
It's not who coined the term, but who copyrighted it, who wins...
--
John Wilkins
B'dies, Brutius
Severian
I think someone is going to be Berned.
--
Please remove your clothes when replying by e-mail.
Now playing: Frank Black - 21 Reasons
catshark
<wett...@attbi.com> wrote:
>In article <b2ulj...@drn.newsguy.com>, TomS wrote:
>> "On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 00:13:44 +0000 (UTC), in article
>><991ea4ae.0302...@posting.google.com>, gro...@cco.caltech.edu
>> stated..."
>>>
>>>lil...@umich.edu (Lilith) wrote in message
>>>news:<75200cbc.03021...@posting.google.com>...
>>>>wedge...@hotmail.com (Wedge Buster) wrote in message
>>>>news:<d1abe9ac.0302...@posting.google.com>...
>>>> > http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm
>>>> >
[snip]
My idea was that Behe is hard of hearing and what the neighbor really
said was: "a hundred years ago my great grandfather and a thousand of
his friends started to cross the canyon, by slowly and laboriously
climbing down one side, crossing the valley and climbing up the other
side, each taking a different route. It took so long that children,
then grandchildren and great grandchildren were born along the way.
But it was so dangerous that nobody but me made it all the way. You
obviously didn't watch the whole trip but I assure you that guy you
saw a hundred years ago (no wonder Behe doesn't hear so good),
standing in that crowd on the other side, was my great grand dad.
Someday I'm going to get around to writing something about how all of
Behe's analogies are equally bad or worse. He is the master of the
malaprop metaphor.
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
Cogito sum, ergo sum, cogito.
- Robert Carroll -
Steven J.
> wedge...@hotmail.com (Wedge Buster) wrote in message news:<d1abe9ac.0302...@posting.google.com>...
> > http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm
> >
> > STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
> > By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
>
> > So let me spell out the premises of the argument
> > as well as its conclusion: Certain biological systems have a feature,
> > call it IC (irreducible complexity). Darwinians don't have a clue how
> > biological systems with that feature originated (Miller disputes this
> > premise, but we'll come back to it). We know that intelligent agency
> > has the causal power to produce systems that exhibit IC (e.g., many
> > human artifacts exhibit IC). Therefore, biological systems that
> > exhibit IC are likely to be designed.
>
> Is Dembski really saying that all he has to offer is a non-sequitor
> based on an argument from analogy that presumes the very thing he is trying to
> show?
>
> His argument seems to be
> 1) All A are B (All flagella are IC)
> 2) Some C are B (Some designed objects are IC)
> Therefore some A are C (Some flagella are designed)
>
nonintelligent mechanism can produce IC systems. So his argument
would be:
Major premise one: Nothing IC can be produced by Darwinian mechanisms.
Major premise two: Things that are IC can be produced by intelligent
design.
Minor premise: Bacterial flagella are IC.
Conclusion one: The flagellum cannot be the product of Darwinian
mechanisms.
Conclusion two: The flagellum can be the product of intelligent
design.
Reasoning from conclusion two to desired conclusion three, that the
flagellum *is* the product of intelligent design, is accomplished by
assuming that if no one has offered an alternative to both ID and
"Darwinism," no alternative can exist.
Now, evolutionary biologists *do* have ideas (Dembski has shown
elsewhere that he is aware of them) about how mutation and natural
selection can produce IC systems (e.g. "scaffolding" -- loss of
components that previously performed a function -- and incremental
increase in the necessity for some ability, and increasing
specialization of components, so that they become better at some
functions while losing others entirely). And, indeed, as Miller
points out, simple IC systems have been observed to evolve.
Now, Miller's examples are nowhere near so complex as the flagellum.
But, of course, as any proper creationist will remind us, human
intelligent design has also not produced anything like the bacterial
flagellum. So either major premise one is wrong, or major premise two
is irrelevant.
>
> An incredible blunder for such a clever person (just ask Dembski and
> he will tell you that he has 2 Phds) to make.
>
> Of course, his 'don't have a clue' translates to saying that we don't
> have a time machine to go back and reproduce every bacterium, and show
> how each and every step was advantageous.
>
>
> <skip>
-- Steven J.
John Wilkins
I don't have the book here, but Pennock's _Tower of Babel_ has a much
better metaphor about frogs crossing a highway, IIRC.
zosdad
Then you better give a share to Bill Gates, I heard that it was a
spell-checker correction of "IDist" that gave rise to "IDiot" and of
course Bill has his spellchecker copyrighted...
nic
catshark
Wilkins) wrote:
>catshark <cats...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 01:51:03 +0000 (UTC), Mark VandeWettering
>> <wett...@attbi.com> wrote:
>>
>> >In article <b2ulj...@drn.newsguy.com>, TomS wrote:
>> >> "On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 00:13:44 +0000 (UTC), in article
>> >><991ea4ae.0302...@posting.google.com>, gro...@cco.caltech.edu
>> >> stated..."
>> >>>
>> >>>lil...@umich.edu (Lilith) wrote in message
>> >>>news:<75200cbc.03021...@posting.google.com>...
>> >>>>wedge...@hotmail.com (Wedge Buster) wrote in message
>> >>>>news:<d1abe9ac.0302...@posting.google.com>...
>> >>>> > http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm
>> >>>> >
[snip]
>>
>> Someday I'm going to get around to writing something about how all of
>> Behe's analogies are equally bad or worse. He is the master of the
>> malaprop metaphor.
>>
>I don't have the book here, but Pennock's _Tower of Babel_ has a much
>better metaphor about frogs crossing a highway, IIRC.
Groundhogs.
======================(Begin Quote)==========================
In a chapter entitled "Road Kill," Behe replays the story of
unbridgeable chasms, this time with a tale of a groundhog trying to
cross lanes of traffic, which purportedly illustrates a problem for
evolution . . .
"Suppose you were a groundhog sitting by the side of a road several
hundred times wider than the Schuylkill Expressway. There are a
thousand lanes going east and a thousand lanes going west, each filled
with trucks, sports cars, and minivans doing the speed limit. Your
groundhog sweetheart is on the other side, inviting you to come over.
You notice that the remains of your rivals in love are mostly in lane
one, with some in lane two, and a few dotted out to lanes three and
four; there are none beyond that. Furthermore, the romantic rule is
that you must keep your eyes closed during the journey. ... You see
the chubby brown face of your sweetie smiling, the little whiskers
wiggling, the soft eyes beckoning. You hear the eighteen-wheelers
screaming. And all you can do is close your eyes and pray."
This supposedly illustrates a basic problem for gradualistic
evolution, which would maintain that the highway was not crossed all
at once but one lane at a time. Behe says he has a better explanation
-- God's intelligent design. Better? Let us put it in terms of Behe's
story to see how the intelligent-design "theorist" must imagine how
the groundhog crossed this uncrossable highway. According to IDCs,
God's design is necessarily for a purpose, so we must suppose that the
groundhog and his sweetie must literally have been a match made in
heaven. Taking Behe's metaphor to its logical conclusion, what his
alternative "explanation" comes to is just this: God must have sent
down Cupid to fly the lovesick little' fellow over to his sweetie.
Even if we were to agree that the odds were greatly stacked against
the groundhog's crossing the highway ollihis own, surely this is still
a more reasonable working hypothesis than to jump to the conclusion
that he got across by some divine airlift.
======================(End Quote)==============================
At least I think that is the one you meant.
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
The political motivation behind the Wedge Strategy:
"Religion is the opiate of the masses . . .
and that is a _good_ thing."
-- Bobby Bryant --
catshark
Whoops! Should have read a little farther. This is what you meant,
I'm sure:
======================(Continue Quote)==========================
Instead of having our groundhog prayerfully inching out where angels
fear to tread, toward his sweetie, and past the dead bodies of his
unsuccessful rivals strewn about the first few lanes of the
superhighway, to represent the Darwinian picture correctly Behe should
have had Mr. and Mrs. Groundhog and the whole great population of
groundhogs striking out en masse. Behe is right that most would not
survive even the first lane and if they continued straight on then
fewer and fewer would be left after each lane. But wait ...
gradualistic evolution does not claim that a population just heads
across a gap in this way. Rather it observes that Mr. and Mrs.
Groundhog and those of their fellows who have successfully made it
past the first lane (perhaps because they stepped just a little
quicker than those who failed to make it) stop to have a bunch of
kids. With the population now more or less returned to its former
numbers, Ma and Pa then retire and leave the second generation to
tackle lane two. The casualties still will be legion, but this time
the whole group starts off being on average a bit fleeter of foot than
the previous. Again, those whose slightly fitter characteristics allow
them to survive the second lane and reproduce yield the race across
lane three to the third generation. With each generation, new
variations arise, and though in many cases these will hinder rather
than help in the race, those few with useful new traits (not just
increased swiftness but perhaps also sneakiness, better hearing,
larger litters, and so on) will likely carry them forward to their
offspring and in this way each generation-naturally selected by the
traffic -- will turn out to be better adapted to their dangerous
environment. Mr. and Mrs. Groundhog never themselves cross the entire
superhighway; it is their distant descendants, now quite modified, who
will be found on the other side. If these descendants were to look
back after their journey at the descendants of other groundhogs from
the original population who never moved out into the highway
environment, many would no doubt find it hard to believe that they are
related as cousins to those slow and dim-witted creatures. However,
one of them might, if he could, write a daring book like Behe's and
argue that they are in fact descended from a common ancestor, but that
their journey across was, literally, and not just metaphorically,
miraculous.
======================(End Quote)==============================
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
The devil is in the details.
Science explains them.
Intelligent design explains them away.
- Mark VandeWettering -
Ron Okimoto
zosdad wrote:
When I got my first Mac in 1993 the Microsoft spell checker offered cretinist as the correct spelling for
creationist. I've always wondered if that was on purpose.
Ron Okimoto
Rodjk
> >
> > STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
> > By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
> >
> >
> > Michael Ruse (Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Cambridge
> > University Press, forthcoming 2004), I expected I'd have till the
> > actual publication date next year to respond to it. But since Miller's
> > contribution has now officially appeared on his website
> > (http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html -- it is
> > titled "The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of 'Irreducible
> > Complexity'"), I want to comment on it at this time. I'll go through
> > Miller's paper sequentially and respond bullet-point fashion:
>
> [...]
>
> The blatant hypocrisy of IDists like Dembski continues to amaze me. (If I
> read the article right, Behe is now arguing that it's illegitimate to prove
> an IC system might have evolved by showing that a subset of its parts could
> have a different function.) "Since you don't know the exact details of how
> this evolved, it is therefore impossible that it could have evolved, and
> therefore *our* model, which provides not a single detail whatsoever, must
> be the correct one!" I mean, come on - these are *elementary* logical
> fallacies they're using.
You are forgetting, ID is only pretending to be science. The important
people are the people they need to fool. Judges and school board
members will not know (or care) if it is logical as long as it meets
their understanding of science and/or gives support to their religious
views.
And as far as their scientific integrity, as long as Dembski and Behe
do not try to publish their nonsense they have not done anything to
call attention to themselves. They sound like scientist to those not
aware of the peer-review process, and they can continue to cry that
journals won't publish their work.
Though the scientific community knows better, will they be able to
convince an increasingly right wing judiciary of the foolishness of
the ID claims?
Personally, I doubt it.
>Reading an ID argument is like reading an example
> paragraph taken out of a book for a high-school-level critical thinking
> class. Do these people have no shame at all?
No. They are trying to save souls.
>Where do they get the chutzpah
> to denounce evolution for not providing a detailed, step-by-step,
> gene-by-gene testable model for the evolution of a particular biochemical
> system, when they advocate an alternative that has yet to provide a
> *single* testable detail about the development of *anything*? Some (I among
> them) might go so far as to say that ID is a hypothesis which could not
> provide such detail even in principle. Certainly, if there is a way for ID
> to extract such history, its advocates haven't even begun to hint at what
> it is. Instead they've been spending 100% of their time taking wild swings
> at evolution. This is not the behavior of scientists; it's the behavior of
> politicians and public relations firms, if anything.
Exactly. Now you are catching on. But will the judges...
Rodjk #613
John Wilkins
> On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:19:43 +0000 (UTC), catshark
> <cats...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 06:23:22 +0000 (UTC), wil...@wehi.edu.au (John
> >Wilkins) wrote:
> >
> >>catshark <cats...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 01:51:03 +0000 (UTC), Mark VandeWettering
> >>> <wett...@attbi.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> >In article <b2ulj...@drn.newsguy.com>, TomS wrote:
> >>> >> "On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 00:13:44 +0000 (UTC), in article
> >>> >>gro...@cco.caltech.edu
> >>> >> stated..."
> >>> >>>
> >>> >>>lil...@umich.edu (Lilith) wrote...
> >>> >>>>wedge...@hotmail.com (Wedge Buster) wrote...
> >>> >>>> > http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.
That's it. I wonder if we could get Rob to allow us to put it up online?
Lenny Flank
wrote:
>You are forgetting, ID is only pretending to be science. The important
>people are the people they need to fool. Judges and school board
>members will not know (or care) if it is logical as long as it meets
>their understanding of science and/or gives support to their religious
>views.
>And as far as their scientific integrity, as long as Dembski and Behe
>do not try to publish their nonsense they have not done anything to
>call attention to themselves. They sound like scientist to those not
>aware of the peer-review process, and they can continue to cry that
>journals won't publish their work.
The counter to this strategy is devestatingly simple-----ask the
IDers, everywhere they are and every time they open their mouth, to
just tell us what the alternatvie scientific theory of intelligent
design is. The one they want taught in science classrooms. Tell them
to quit whining about evil evolution is and how the big bad scientists
are all materialists and all that irrelevant crud, and just TELL US
WHAT THEIR SCIENTIFIC THEORY IS.
The resulting silence will be thundering.
=================================================
Lenny Flank
"There are no loose threads in the web of life"
Creation "Science" Debunked
http://www.geocities.com/lflank
Lenny Flank's Reptile Page
http://www.geocities.com/lflank/herp.html
catshark
Wilkins) wrote:
>catshark <cats...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:19:43 +0000 (UTC), catshark
>> <cats...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 06:23:22 +0000 (UTC), wil...@wehi.edu.au (John
>> >Wilkins) wrote:
>> >
>> >>catshark <cats...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 01:51:03 +0000 (UTC), Mark VandeWettering
>> >>> <wett...@attbi.com> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> >In article <b2ulj...@drn.newsguy.com>, TomS wrote:
>> >>> >> "On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 00:13:44 +0000 (UTC), in article
>> >>> >>gro...@cco.caltech.edu
>> >>> >> stated..."
>> >>> >>>
>> >>> >>>lil...@umich.edu (Lilith) wrote...
>> >>> >>>>wedge...@hotmail.com (Wedge Buster) wrote...
>> >>> >>>> > http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.
>Miller_Response.htm
>> >>> >>>> >
[snip]
>>
I think it would be great if somebody who knew him well enough to call
him "Rob" would ask. ;-)
Bobby D. Bryant
> zosdad wrote:
>> Then you better give a share to Bill Gates, I heard that it was a
>> spell-checker correction of "IDist" that gave rise to "IDiot" and of
>> course Bill has his spellchecker copyrighted...
> When I got my first Mac in 1993 the Microsoft spell checker offered
> cretinist as the correct spelling for creationist. I've always wondered
> if that was on purpose.
Back in the day I used Ami Pro with its then state-of-the-art grammar
checker, and decided the state of the art was "not there yet" when I wrote
an undergraduate paper on the Pharaohs and it recommended changing
"dying kings" to "dyeing kings".
John Wilkins
> On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 23:18:18 +0000 (UTC), wil...@wehi.edu.au (John
> Wilkins) wrote:
>
...
> >>
> >That's it. I wonder if we could get Rob to allow us to put it up online?
>
> I think it would be great if somebody who knew him well enough to call
> him "Rob" would ask. ;-)
Duly done.
Rodjk
> On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 19:44:40 +0000 (UTC), rjk...@yahoo.com (Rodjk)
> wrote:
> >You are forgetting, ID is only pretending to be science. The important
> >people are the people they need to fool. Judges and school board
> >members will not know (or care) if it is logical as long as it meets
> >their understanding of science and/or gives support to their religious
> >views.
> >And as far as their scientific integrity, as long as Dembski and Behe
> >do not try to publish their nonsense they have not done anything to
> >call attention to themselves. They sound like scientist to those not
> >aware of the peer-review process, and they can continue to cry that
> >journals won't publish their work.
>
>
>
>
> The counter to this strategy is devestatingly simple-----ask the
> IDers, everywhere they are and every time they open their mouth, to
> just tell us what the alternatvie scientific theory of intelligent
> design is. The one they want taught in science classrooms. Tell them
> to quit whining about evil evolution is and how the big bad scientists
> are all materialists and all that irrelevant crud, and just TELL US
> WHAT THEIR SCIENTIFIC THEORY IS.
>
> The resulting silence will be thundering.
Yep. But they just throw some BS, then "nod-wink" to the christian
right wing and bam--- court case decided.
I don't like it, Lenny. That is just what I am afraid will happen.
Rodjk #613
Lenny Flank
wrote:
Well, creationist "scientists" and "intelligent design theorists" have
lost every single court case they've ever been involved with. They've
also been soundly defeated at every state or local effort they've made
to get their, uh, "alternative scientific theory" taught in a
classroom.
Why? Because, as they demonstrate abundantly and clearly, they have
no "alternative science" to offer. Just some religious opinions and
whining about science not listening to their religious opinions.
<shrug>
I don't see any court in the land giving them what they want. even
the political conservatives in the Republican Party realize that the
fundies are kooks, and while they aren't avsers to taking the fundies'
votes and their money, they are NOT stupid enough to actually try to
PASS any of the things that the fundies want. The Republicans know as
well as I do that nobody supports or agrees with the fundie program,
and trying to pass it would be politicla suicide.
Frank J
I know what you and Miller mean by "observed to evolve," but the
wording is ambiguous, and Dembski, Behe et al love to exploit that.
All "IC" biochemical systems are observed to arise by descent with
modification from other "IC" biochemical systems. Of course we don't
know much chemical detail of long-gone changes, but we can use the
observed genetic changes in modern organisms, including the fact that
they occur in parallel, to conclude that present "IC" systems must
have "evolved" from very different "IC" systems over long periods of
time. The alternative would be either "independent abiogenesis" or
"saltation," and Dembski, Behe et al have provided even less chemical
detail for this than Miller et al have provided for evolution. They
have, as you know, provided none.
Behe at least can be excused for not proposing an "independent
abiogenesis" or "saltation" model, because he has openly admitted
acceptance of common descent, and has offered a radical "one-time
abiogenesis" model, whereby all the IC systems arose at once in a
single organism. Of course, he has provided no chemical detail on that
either.
Gotta love the double standard!
(skip)
Frank J
> wrote:
> >You are forgetting, ID is only pretending to be science. The important
> >people are the people they need to fool. Judges and school board
> >members will not know (or care) if it is logical as long as it meets
> >their understanding of science and/or gives support to their religious
> >views.
> >And as far as their scientific integrity, as long as Dembski and Behe
> >do not try to publish their nonsense they have not done anything to
> >call attention to themselves. They sound like scientist to those not
> >aware of the peer-review process, and they can continue to cry that
> >journals won't publish their work.
>
>
>
>
> The counter to this strategy is devestatingly simple-----ask the
> IDers, everywhere they are and every time they open their mouth, to
> just tell us what the alternatvie scientific theory of intelligent
> design is. The one they want taught in science classrooms. Tell them
> to quit whining about evil evolution is and how the big bad scientists
> are all materialists and all that irrelevant crud, and just TELL US
> WHAT THEIR SCIENTIFIC THEORY IS.
IOW, get Behe to expand on his "complex origins" hypothesis, to which
he devotes < 1% of "Darwin's Black Box," and perhaps 30 seconds of
defense in the 7 years since.
For Wells and other IDers who deny common descent, get them to pick
one of the "independent origins" hypotheses to which I frequently
refer, or come up with one of their own.
Then Behe and Wells can have a healthy scientific debate with each
other, and have no need to criticize "Darwinism" and misrepresent
evolution.
Frank J
> Wedge Buster <wedge...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:d1abe9ac.0302...@posting.google.com...
> >
> > STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
> > By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
> >
> >
> > Michael Ruse (Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Cambridge
> > University Press, forthcoming 2004), I expected I'd have till the
> > actual publication date next year to respond to it. But since Miller's
> > contribution has now officially appeared on his website
> > (http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html -- it is
> > titled "The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of 'Irreducible
> > Complexity'"), I want to comment on it at this time. I'll go through
> > Miller's paper sequentially and respond bullet-point fashion:
>
> [...]
>
> The blatant hypocrisy of IDists like Dembski continues to amaze me. (If I
> read the article right, Behe is now arguing that it's illegitimate to prove
> an IC system might have evolved by showing that a subset of its parts could
> have a different function.) "Since you don't know the exact details of how
> this evolved, it is therefore impossible that it could have evolved, and
> therefore *our* model, which provides not a single detail whatsoever, must
> be the correct one!" I mean, come on - these are *elementary* logical
> paragraph taken out of a book for a high-school-level critical thinking
> to denounce evolution for not providing a detailed, step-by-step,
> gene-by-gene testable model for the evolution of a particular biochemical
> system, when they advocate an alternative that has yet to provide a
> *single* testable detail about the development of *anything*? Some (I among
> them) might go so far as to say that ID is a hypothesis which could not
> provide such detail even in principle. Certainly, if there is a way for ID
> to extract such history, its advocates haven't even begun to hint at what
> it is. Instead they've been spending 100% of their time taking wild swings
> at evolution. This is not the behavior of scientists; it's the behavior of
> politicians and public relations firms, if anything.
Couldn't have said it nearly as well. On another note, may I nominate
Andy Groves' reply to Lilith (Climbing Chimney Impossible) for POTM?
John Wilkins
Pennock okays it. He wants to see it before it goes up, and it has to
include both passages. If you do the citations and so forth, and link it
in with the Behe and Dembski metaphors, I'll send it to him for
checking.
--
John Wilkins
"Listen to your heart, not the voices in your head" - Marge Simpson
catshark
(John Wilkins) wrote:
>John Wilkins <wil...@wehi.edu.au> wrote:
>
>> catshark <cats...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> > On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 23:18:18 +0000 (UTC), wil...@wehi.edu.au (John
>> > Wilkins) wrote:
>> >
>> ...
>> > >>
>> > >That's it. I wonder if we could get Rob to allow us to put it up online?
>> >
>> > I think it would be great if somebody who knew him well enough to call
>> > him "Rob" would ask. ;-)
>>
>> Duly done.
>
>Pennock okays it. He wants to see it before it goes up, and it has to
>include both passages. If you do the citations and so forth, and link it
>in with the Behe and Dembski metaphors, I'll send it to him for
>checking.
Ok. It could take a few days as I'm particularly busy right now but
that should be no problem. However, I have the paperback edition of
_Tower_ and my local library is undergoing renovations and some of the
collection is not easily available, so someone might have to help if
he/you want the citations to the original.
It could be expanded on later as we could get to it. I particularly
want to rain on Behe's elephant in a room full of detectives analogy,
since he fails to mention that the elephant is invisible and the
IDiots aren't even interested in knowing if it really is an elephant
or a mouse with a thyroid condition.
I suppose the "master of the malaprop metaphor" line is too harsh for
what you have in mind . . . ;-)
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
We have done amazingly well in creating a cultural movement,
but we must not exaggerate ID's successes on the scientific front.
- William A. Dembski -
Boggs
> wedge...@hotmail.com (Wedge Buster) wrote in message news:<d1abe9ac.0302...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> > STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: A RESPONSE TO KEN MILLER
> > By William A. Dembski, 2.17.03, v.1
<snip excellent piece of analysis of Dembski's argument _ad
ignorantiam_>
...
> I don't get why this point is being argued by the ID'ers.
> ...
It's the only tactic the IDiots have: they always simply try to get
away with the argumeent that there is no proof their "theory"
(untestable metaphysical proposition, actually) is false.
See a more blatant example of Dembski trying to get away with arguing
there is no proof ID is false (argument _ad ignorantiam_):
"Is intelligent design falsifiable? ... Intelligent design is
eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible
complexity in biology are within the theory of intelligent design the
key markers of intelligent agency. If it could be shown that
biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully
complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual
Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent
design would be falsified ..." -- Dembski
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/dembski/docs/bd-testable.html