The IDiocy that never existed

[RonO]

https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
about an ID scam that never existed. For one thing there never was
supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam. When IDiocy
started the ID perps were lying about it not being about their religious
beliefs, and they didn't start their religious web sites and categories
like "Faith and Science" at the ID scam propaganda site until after the
scam was exposed during the Dover fiasco. No one has ever gotten any ID
science out of any of the ID perps. Not ever. All any IDiot rube
creationists ever get from the ID perps is an obfuscation and denial
switch scam that the ID perps tell them has nothing to do with ID. ID
has only been the bait for over 20 years. They have only used ID to
attract the creationist rubes in order to feed them the switch scam.
Nearly all IDiotic creationist rubes never wanted the switch scam, and
currently only Louisiana and Texas still have switch scam legislation or
school board policies still on the books. Neither state has tried to
use the switch scam to support their creationist beliefs since they had
the bait and switch run on them again in 2013. The ID perps had to
remind the IDiots that the switch scam was supposed to have nothing to
do with ID creationism when both states tried to put ID creationist
supplements into school textbooks. Neither state has tried again in the
last decade.

The article seems to be claiming that all the apparent failures of
IDiocy are due to ID being misunderstood by the creationist rubes. The
book sounds about as lame as Meyer's God Hypothesis that never put up
any coherent hypothesis about God, but just disjointed and disassociated
god-of-the-gaps denial junk. Meyer claimed that he did not want to
create a coherent hypothesis that could be related to his personal god
hypothesis, so he just used the god-of-the-gaps nonsense as independent
bits of denial that were not supposed to be used to develop any type of
real god hypothesis.

Gauger's book seems to be just misrepresentation of reality, and not
something that is about anything that really ever existed. You just
have to look at the other IDiotic articles put up for the last few years
to support the ID scam at the creationist news site to understand that
she isn't talking about any type of ID that any ID perps are associated
with. Just like Luskin's article on what ID was supposed to be and how
it should be defended, you can look at how the ID perps are actually
defending IDiocy at the news site where Luskin published the article,
and you know that Luskin is out to lunch.

Still recommended up at the creationist news site.
https://evolutionnews.org/2021/12/what-is-intelligent-design-and-how-should-we-defend-it/

They both should have read the junk that actually gets posted there to
support the ID scam before writing what they have.

Ron Okimoto

[JTEM is my hero]

RonO wrote:

> Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> about an ID scam that never existed. For one thing there never was
> supposed to be a Catholic case for the

Strict creationism, Intelligent Design is a fundamentalist Protestant
(or Evangelical, if you prefer) phenomenon. The Catholic church has
no problem if members want to believe in a literally true bible but
neither does it teach it.

Google: Mendel

Then Google: mendelian laws of genetics

This is not new. This wasn't new 100 years ago.

Ironically, your Darwin gets the credit for setting back the English
speaking world FOR DECADES when he became the face of naturalism
and swept Mendel under the carpet... so well, in fact, that idiots think
the Catholic church is teaching I.D. more than 150 years after Mendel
proved they are wrong...

Some people just need the extra time to "Catch up," I suppose...





-- --

https://jtem.tumblr.com/post/716051658844651520

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
>
> Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> about an ID scam that never existed.

The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
sign of comprehending the first thing about.

You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
had written such things as:

____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
…Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
=========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

>For one thing there never was
> supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam.

There always was a Catholic case for the design in nature,
especially in Thomas Aquinas's writings. Ron O has no good way
to distinguish between that and the things he grossly distorts below,
because he utterly loathes any attempt to argue for God's existence
in a rational way.

In this respect he is worse than some atheists and agnostics.
One of the latter, Loren Eiseley, in a book about our evolution
from lowly life forms, wrote the following about one of the earliest tetrapods:

``Perhaps there also, among rotting fish heads and blue,
night-burning bog lights, moved the eternal mystery,
the careful finger of God. The increase was not much.
It was two bubbles, two thin-walled little balloons at the
end of the Snout's small brain. The cerebral hemispheres
had appeared.''
--Loren Eiseley, _The Immense Journey_


Ron O now goes into another one of his formulaic rants, already old a
decade and more ago, about an imaginary "bait and switch scam" for which
he has never given any credible evidence for the existence of "bait."

>When IDiocy started the ID perps were lying about it not being about their religious
> beliefs, and they didn't start their religious web sites and categories
> like "Faith and Science" at the ID scam propaganda site until after the
> scam was exposed during the Dover fiasco. No one has ever gotten any ID
> science out of any of the ID perps. Not ever.

This is a gross distortion of what happened at Dover, and the
last two sentences are an indication of how ignorant Ron O
is about the nature of scientific theories. I told Burkhard
last month about a theory that Behe built about the limitations
of mutation, especially where the malaria parasite is concerned:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/aEWcwKdnhaY/m/b3QDSySsAAAJ
Re: steady state theory of biological origin
Apr 18, 2023, 10:20:25 PM

Behe did this in the book, _The_Edge_of_Evolution_, which Ron O shows
no signs of ever heard about.

> All any IDiot rube
> creationists ever get from the ID perps is an obfuscation and denial
> switch scam that the ID perps tell them has nothing to do with ID. ID
> has only been the bait for over 20 years. They have only used ID to
> attract the creationist rubes in order to feed them the switch scam.
> Nearly all IDiotic creationist rubes never wanted the switch scam, and
> currently only Louisiana and Texas still have switch scam legislation or
> school board policies still on the books. Neither state has tried to
> use the switch scam to support their creationist beliefs since they had
> the bait and switch run on them again in 2013. The ID perps had to
> remind the IDiots that the switch scam was supposed to have nothing to
> do with ID creationism when both states tried to put ID creationist
> supplements into school textbooks. Neither state has tried again in the
> last decade.

Finally, Ron O tries to connect with the article, and fails miserably:

> The article seems to be claiming that all the apparent failures of
> IDiocy are due to ID being misunderstood by the creationist rubes.

NO such claim is even hinted at in the book. Christian critics of ID are described
as misunderstanding it, but none of them is described as having any taint of
creationism. One of those critics, Kenneth Miller, is as zealous a foe
of ID (and especially Behe) as any atheist.

The "failures" are purely political, and are due to a massive disinformation
campaign at all levels, including Ron O's own rantings. Primary is the
false claim that ID is religion-based creationism. It is not, as the
first excerpt above shows. Here is another:

______________________ second excerpt________________________

While all ID proponents agree that certain features of nature are best explained by an intelligent cause, on many side issues ID proponents may have different points of view, with different assumptions. For example, ID makes no claim about universal common descent. Some ID supporters agree with universal common descent, but many ID supporters argue against the idea that all life shares a common ancestor. There are also different views about the ways in which design may be instantiated, and the degree to which natural processes are involved. These different views are not necessarily a sign of something bad — in fact to a large extent they reflect a healthy diversity of models that exist and are being discussed, tested, and refined.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of second excerpt ++++++++++++++

> The book sounds about as lame as Meyer's God Hypothesis that never put up
> any coherent hypothesis about God, but just disjointed and disassociated
> god-of-the-gaps denial junk. Meyer claimed that he did not want to
> create a coherent hypothesis that could be related to his personal god
> hypothesis, so he just used the god-of-the-gaps nonsense as independent
> bits of denial that were not supposed to be used to develop any type of
> real god hypothesis.
>

Ron O is pretending that all arguments about design are intended
to give a coherent picture of God. The second excerpt puts paid to that,
but here is another excerpt that reads almost like a direct answer
to Ron O's crap in the preceding paragraph:

_____________________ third excerpt________________________
Design proponents have made arguments for real rather than apparent design at different levels. For instance, they’ve argued that the beginning of the universe requires an intelligent cause (William Lane Craig and James Sinclair), that the laws of physics are designed (Robin Collins), that our planet is uniquely designed (Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards), that chemistry as we know it is designed for life (Michael Denton; Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt), that the building blocks of living things cannot be found by blind searches but must be designed (Douglas Axe), that the first living creature and the fossil record give evidence of design (Stephen Meyer), and that both macro- and micro-features of living things give evidence of intelligent design (Michael Denton; Michael Behe).

Note three quick things about these arguments. First, contrary to ste­reotypes, these arguments are not “god-of-the-gaps” arguments. None of these arguments claims, “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” Rather, the standard mode of argumentation for design proponents is an inference to the best explanation — a common form of reasoning in general and in the historical sciences (like evolutionary biology) in particular. They argue that there are positive signs of intentional design in nature and that non-intentional explanations are weak by comparison.

++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of second excerpt ++++++++++++++

> Gauger's book seems to be just misrepresentation of reality, and not
> something that is about anything that really ever existed. You just
> have to look at the other IDiotic articles put up for the last few years
> to support the ID scam at the creationist news site to understand that
> she isn't talking about any type of ID that any ID perps are associated with.

Ron O has shot himself in the foot by disqualifying real ID theory
as being the thing he ranted about in his stereotyped spiel.

> Just like Luskin's article on what ID was supposed to be and how
> it should be defended, you can look at how the ID perps are actually
> defending IDiocy at the news site where Luskin published the article,
> and you know that Luskin is out to lunch.
>
> Still recommended up at the creationist news site.
> https://evolutionnews.org/2021/12/what-is-intelligent-design-and-how-should-we-defend-it/
>
> They both should have read the junk that actually gets posted there to
> support the ID scam before writing what they have.
>
> Ron Okimoto

To use one of Ron O's favorite insults against him:
"You can't make this junk up."
-- meaning, the truth of what junk Ron O is capable of is stranger than any
fiction anyone could make up about him.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> > https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
> >
> > Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> > about an ID scam that never existed.
> The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
> and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
> sign of comprehending the first thing about.
>
> You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
> had written such things as:
>
> ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
> …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
> =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.
In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.

It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief
system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:35:08 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> > > https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
> > >
> > > Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> > > about an ID scam that never existed.
> > The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
> > and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
> > sign of comprehending the first thing about.
> >
> > You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
> > had written such things as:
> >
> > ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
> > …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
> > =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================
> A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
> things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.

You are conflating the part after the dash with the part that came before.

> In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.

She is honest about both things: the things that ID theorists
write about qua ID theorists, and the things to which Catholics
are dogmatically committed.

If you can find a place in the article where Granger confuses
the two issues, I'd certainly like to know about it.

>
> It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief
> system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
> just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

You obviously didn't read far enough to see what I wrote about to your buddy Burkhard:

_________________________ repost of snipped text___________________

I told Burkhard last month about a theory that Behe built about the limitations
of mutation, especially where the malaria parasite is concerned:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/aEWcwKdnhaY/m/b3QDSySsAAAJ
Re: steady state theory of biological origin
Apr 18, 2023, 10:20:25 PM

Behe did this in the book, _The_Edge_of_Evolution_, which Ron O shows
no signs of ever [having] heard about.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of repost +++++++++++++++

How well do you know that book? Burkhard showed how little he understood
about it in the text I preserved in the linked post.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Öö Tiib]

On Tuesday, 2 May 2023 at 16:10:08 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> > https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
> >
> > Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> > about an ID scam that never existed.
> The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
> and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
> sign of comprehending the first thing about.
>
> You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
> had written such things as:
>
> ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
> …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
> =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================
> >For one thing there never was
> > supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam.
> There always was a Catholic case for the design in nature,
> especially in Thomas Aquinas's writings. Ron O has no good way
> to distinguish between that and the things he grossly distorts below,
> because he utterly loathes any attempt to argue for God's existence
> in a rational way.
>

There have always been some con artists among Catholics (like in any
organisation) but Catholics as Church never wanted to participate in that
particular intelligent design scam and in science debates in general. Most
Catholics I know of (in our massively atheist country) say that they
believe because they feel Jesus participating in their lives, not because
there is some kind of science that shows that God actively did cause
floods or destruction of Pompeii or something. Catholics say that human
soul is made by God and is not natural process so beyond science.
>
Also, how do "Certain features of the universe and of living things are best
explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process." and
“I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” differ? Former is
just saying less than latter with more words.
>
The evolutionnews/discotute still do never publish any positive clams about
how, when and why anything happened. What most important they still do
never research it. Only obfuscation, denial and fake political promises. Fake
promises to find strong indications in natural world that there is God.
To find those indications with science that they never do. How it is not
scam? How it does not hurt? So the Catholic Church stays wisely out of
such "scientific" arguments and debates.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:15:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> If you can find a place in the article where Granger confuses
> the two issues, I'd certainly like to know about it.

Of course, "Granger" should read "Gauger."

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:15:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:35:08 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> > > > https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
> > > >
> > > > Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> > > > about an ID scam that never existed.
> > > The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
> > > and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
> > > sign of comprehending the first thing about.
> > >
> > > You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
> > > had written such things as:
> > >
> > > ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
> > > …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
> > > =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

> > A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
> > things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.

> You are conflating the part after the dash with the part that came before.

Two words that are different: conflating, incorporating.

You conflate incorporating with conflating. You attempt to manufacture
a separation between the a priori dogmatic conviction in a god the designer
with a process of examining nature with the purpose of detecting design.

And it doesn't matter if you further manufacture a hypothetical distinction
between the attempt to find design and an unbiased look at nature. There
still exists the prior commitment to the conclusion of your God having
designed nature.

It remains a lie to play pretend that you aren't committed to your a priori
conclusion that your God has designed life and the universe.

> > In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.

> She is honest about both things: the things that ID theorists
> write about qua ID theorists, and the things to which Catholics
> are dogmatically committed.
>
> If you can find a place in the article where Granger confuses
> the two issues, I'd certainly like to know about it.

She appears to be honest about not asserting a false narrative
that makes a fraudulent game of ignoring the reality of one
while doing the other. But I have to wonder at your apparent
attempt to twist in an insinuation that I questioned her honesty
as I was applauding it.

> > It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief
> > system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
> > just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

> You obviously didn't read far enough to see what I wrote about to your buddy Burkhard:

As usual, you do not accomplish what you imagine you do.
Not only would your claim below be irrelevant if it were true, it's dubious as well.
You addressed the argument to Burkhard so I didn't jump in to refute you.
You're tried to argue the point with him before, and I think you failed. Moreover,
you abandoned the argument when you cited chapter and verse examples
of how you were mistaken. Your response was to repeat your ad hominen
claim that he is a "scientific non-entity" (with the implied self-aggrandized
implication that you are his superior).

I don't know if he wants anyone to jump in and dispute you. So far, every
time he has bothered he's torn you to shreds and you've ignored those
posts and started all over again in different threads.

By your own methods, if I had jumped in to expose where I thought
your lines of argument were wrong, you would have retorted with
complaints about people teaming up to pick on you. Between that
and Burkhard being quite capable of exposing where you were wrong,
I figured the best move was to just go buy some popcorn and enjoy the
show. The only reason I hedge on this now is that if I had come back
from 3 weeks hiking around Corfu I might size up the significance
(more properly the lack of significance) of your attacks and just ignore
them until I had some important article to avoid writing.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2 May 2023 at 16:10:08 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> > > https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
> > >
> > > Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> > > about an ID scam that never existed.
> > The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
> > and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
> > sign of comprehending the first thing about.
> >
> > You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
> > had written such things as:
> >
> > ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
> > …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
> > =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================
> > >For one thing there never was
> > > supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam.

> > There always was a Catholic case for the design in nature,
> > especially in Thomas Aquinas's writings. Ron O has no good way
> > to distinguish between that and the things he grossly distorts below,
> > because he utterly loathes any attempt to argue for God's existence
> > in a rational way.
> >
> There have always been some con artists among Catholics (like in any
> organisation) but Catholics as Church never wanted to participate in that
> particular intelligent design scam

I see you have bought into the Ron O obsession with his chameleonic
speculation about the existence of a scam by the ID movement.
Rather than getting into its protean variations in this post, I'll be critiquing your idea of "that particular" scam.

> and in science debates in general. Most
> Catholics I know of (in our massively atheist country) say that they
> believe because they feel Jesus participating in their lives,

You are seeing a highly atypical bunch of Evangelical missionaries.
Most Catholics do not allege having such feelings. In fact, an
increasing percentage have even ceased to think of Jesus as more
than an admirable individual of our species. Already, a majority
no longer believe Jesus is present in the Holy Eucharist, never mind
as a participant in their own lives.

> not because
> there is some kind of science that shows that God actively did cause
> floods or destruction of Pompeii or something.

This is a naive form of Biblical literalism having nothing to do with Intelligent Design (ID)
and not much to do with creationism. [Note, I wrote "creationism," not "creationists".]

> Catholics say that human
> soul is made by God and is not natural process so beyond science.

The soul isn't generally believed to be material. As such, it is outside the scope of ID.

>
> Also, how do "Certain features of the universe and of living things are best
> explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process." and
> “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” differ?

The big difference is the word "God." All ID hypothesizes is a designer -- not even a creator.
I have long written about the concept of a designer that naturally evolved in a far older
and grander universe in the multiverse, and had the ability to manipulate the fundamental
constants of a pre-Big-Bang mass of "stuff" to produce a much shorter-lived and
smaller universe -- ours.

I've started to look in detail at one modest approximation to such a grander universe
on the following thread:

Designer of Our Universe by the Back Door?
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/QflrDHqlDD0

> Former is
> just saying less than latter with more words.

On the contrary, the former encompasses a much wider range of possibilities than
the "God of the gaps". And it gets even broader when one considers such events
as the production of the first prokaryotes, and the first eukaryotes reproducing via meiosis,
and the Cambrian explosion. Each can be hypothesized as due to intelligent, technologically advanced
motiles naturally evolved on an exoplanet -- just as YOU believe we evolved from prebiotic
chemical compounds on earth.

> >
> The evolutionnews/discotute still do never publish any positive clams about
> how, when and why anything happened.

So what? I told Burkhard the following in the same post that I recalled for the lazy Daggett:

"We have no idea how, when, and by what route the original human inhabitants of Madagascar got there; nor of how big the first wave was,
nor whether there was a second wave, etc. The one thing we are sure of is that they came
from Southeast Asia, probably Malaysia/Indonesia. All else is folklore with no written records."

Nor, I might add, any artifacts that could be dated to the first century after the coming of
the first arrivals -- whenever it was. Yet we know such things had to have existed.

>What most important they still do never research it. Only obfuscation, denial and fake political promises.

Pure hearsay on your part, and you don't even tell us where you got these ideas.
Surely you aren't so naive as to base ANY of this on the undocumented ravings of Ron O.

Minnich did research the Irreducible Complexity (IC) of one kind of bacterial flagellum.
This is something that Judge Jones shoved down the memory hole of his wretched essay
that he composed as a prelude to his Dover ruling, and which Ron O believes to be gospel truth.

You may retort that this was a far cry from showing that the flagellum was designed.
However, many anti-ID zealots are afraid of admitting even this weak evidence for ID.
Kenneth Miller in particular has made a big deal of trying to refute examples of IC,
and has been made a celebrity by anti-ID zealots for these efforts.

> Fake promises to find strong indications in natural world that there is God.

ID theorists make no such promises. You have had the wool pulled over your eyes by Ron O--and who else?

> To find those indications with science that they never do. How it is not scam?

Such a fictitious combination of events *would* qualify as scam.
If you deny that it is fictitious, please produce evidence.

> How it does not hurt? So the Catholic Church stays wisely out of
> such "scientific" arguments and debates.

So does Behe and all the leading ID theorists. Refute this if you can -- I predict that you will be unable to do so.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 1:10:09 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:15:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:35:08 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > > On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> > > > > https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
> > > > >
> > > > > Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> > > > > about an ID scam that never existed.
> > > > The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
> > > > and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
> > > > sign of comprehending the first thing about.
> > > >
> > > > You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
> > > > had written such things as:
> > > >
> > > > ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
> > > > …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
> > > > =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================
>
> > > A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
> > > things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.
>
> > You are conflating the part after the dash with the part that came before.
> Two words that are different: conflating, incorporating.
>
> You conflate incorporating with conflating.

This is an unwarranted reading of more into what Gauger wrote than she
actually did. If our views on ID were reversed, and you indulged in
such a stretch, jillery would be all over you.

>You attempt to manufacture
> a separation between the a priori dogmatic conviction in a god the designer
> with a process of examining nature with the purpose of detecting design.

Apply that to an atheist attacking design, *mutatis* *mutandis* [1] and try
and see how *ad* *hominem* YOUR allegation is.

[1] for "in a god" substitute "the nonexistence of a god" and for "detecting"
substitute "refuting the existence of".

>
> And it doesn't matter if you further manufacture a hypothetical distinction
> between the attempt to find design and an unbiased look at nature.

It appears that the concept of a disinterested pursuit of truth is alien to your nature.
Thus, your specialized knowledge of scientifically-arrived-at data
is not enough to qualify you as a person with a scientific worldview.

> There still exists the prior commitment to the conclusion of your God having
> designed nature.

Stow the second person "you," matey, or be guilty of grossly misrepresenting me.

>
> It remains a lie to play pretend that you aren't committed to your a priori
> conclusion that your God has designed life and the universe.

Careful, you are bordering on outright libel with your continued use of the second person.


Got to go now. Duty calls.


CONCLUDED tomorrow, barring some more intelligent and less eristic
participant on this thread than yourself joining this thread.
In which case, it may be next week before I return to your agenda-driven screed.


Peter Nyikos

[Lawyer Daggett]

How somebody else would react, according to your imagination,
is absolutely irrelevant. That you invoke this rather than make
an actual point is at best lazy. Most importantly, you have not
expressed a tangible objection, just some antagonistic name dropping.

You introduced a paragraph that included two significant points.
Most people use paragraphs to express a theme. Linking the
two ideas is quite natural. There was no attempt to separate
them by Gauger. It is you who manufacture an artifice to separate
the two.

> >You attempt to manufacture
> > a separation between the a priori dogmatic conviction in a god the designer
> > with a process of examining nature with the purpose of detecting design.

> Apply that to an atheist attacking design, *mutatis* *mutandis* [1] and try
> and see how *ad* *hominem* YOUR allegation is.
>
> [1] for "in a god" substitute "the nonexistence of a god" and for "detecting"
> substitute "refuting the existence of".

You persist with this odd interpretation of atheism. Specifically, you
apparently mean someone who has a dogmatic belief in the non-existence
of god(s). That's not what atheism is. It is a lack of belief, not some
dogmatic conviction.

After correcting for that, if somebody was investigating nature with
a dogmatic conviction that there cannot be any god(s), I'd have a
parallel objection. This doesn't mean they would not be bound by
methodological naturalism if they want to claim a scientific explanation.
So your retort fails quite trivially.

> > And it doesn't matter if you further manufacture a hypothetical distinction
> > between the attempt to find design and an unbiased look at nature.

> It appears that the concept of a disinterested pursuit of truth is alien to your nature.
> Thus, your specialized knowledge of scientifically-arrived-at data
> is not enough to qualify you as a person with a scientific worldview.

Now that is pure ad hominen with no foundation other than your petulant
desire to insult people. There's simply nothing in that quoted sentence
of mine to support your attack.

I'll restate in case your biases are impeded your reading for comprehension.
The ID movement was founded by those who sought to find evidence
of their god in nature. Your Behe was there at the beginning. He has made
it clear that his work is an outlet for his faith. He agrees with the Wedge
folks about some "threat" that a secular world creates.

But as a strategy to make inroads into an increasingly secular world, they
planned to mimic scientific inquiry with the artifice of an abstracted
"designer". They don't really think that way, they just decided they could
make believe they were considering this amorphous thing in order to
sneak past people who rejected their religiously motivated apologetics.

You seem attracted to their game. I suppose that as a mathematician
you're simply comfortable with positing hypotheticals no matter how
absurd they are at face value. The same doesn't fly with science. Unlike
some mathematics, science has a grounding in reality. And in that
grounding, playing make-believe that the designer being considered
isn't some ineffable god(s) and is just an undefined placeholder is
fundamentally dishonest. It is a manufactured artifice.

> > There still exists the prior commitment to the conclusion of your God having
> > designed nature.

> Stow the second person "you," matey, or be guilty of grossly misrepresenting me.

You may be the exception but to me that's more a signature of you havign
drunk some Wedge brand kool-ade.

> > It remains a lie to play pretend that you aren't committed to your a priori
> > conclusion that your God has designed life and the universe.

> Careful, you are bordering on outright libel with your continued use of the second person.

This is yet another bit of dishonest rhetoric you play at. In responding to my
post you issue a caution that I shouldn't do something again, and then later
in the same post, you make an accusation that sounds like you are claiming
I'm doing something again even after you warned me. It's so bloody childish.

> Got to go now. Duty calls.
>
>
> CONCLUDED tomorrow, barring some more intelligent and less eristic
> participant on this thread than yourself joining this thread.
> In which case, it may be next week before I return to your agenda-driven screed.

Lucky for talk.origins that You don't have an agenda.

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:55:09 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:

snip to the only part I care to address right now

> >What most important they still do never research it. Only
> >obfuscation, denial and fake political promises.

> Pure hearsay on your part, and you don't even tell us where you got these ideas.
> Surely you aren't so naive as to base ANY of this on the undocumented ravings of Ron O.
>
> Minnich did research the Irreducible Complexity (IC) of one kind of bacterial flagellum.
> This is something that Judge Jones shoved down the memory hole of his wretched essay
> that he composed as a prelude to his Dover ruling, and which Ron O believes to be gospel truth.
>

You often attempt this argument. It fails.
Nothing about Minnich's work is ID research. His work on the flagellum
was just investigation of the functional role of various proteins. It was
good enough work done on a complex system but it wasn't especially
unique. Essentially identical work on other systems was occurring in
myriad labs around the world using techniques that were certainly
evolving to be easier to perform in the lab, but had essentially been in
play for decades. You knock out a gene and see what happens. In some
cases, you make the gene's expression dependent upon an inserted
regulatory element that you can turn off and on.

It was not work on the origins of flagella. And to the extent that it
does shed light on the origins of flagella, it is suggestive of being
derived from a protein secretory system. That is a functional inference
independent of the parallel inference derived from sequence homologies.

You continue to assert that he did ID research but that isn't true
for any respectable notion of design research.

[Öö Tiib]

Catholics do not of course say that it is "scam". They say something like
that "ID is theological, not scientific theory and God as directly guiding
hand behind evolutionary processes is "God of the gaps" argument."
But as teaching theological theories in public school is possible only
in "comparison of religions" classes not in science classes then fooling
people to think that there actually is science is scam.

> > and in science debates in general. Most
> > Catholics I know of (in our massively atheist country) say that they
> > believe because they feel Jesus participating in their lives,
>
> You are seeing a highly atypical bunch of Evangelical missionaries.
> Most Catholics do not allege having such feelings. In fact, an
> increasing percentage have even ceased to think of Jesus as more
> than an admirable individual of our species. Already, a majority
> no longer believe Jesus is present in the Holy Eucharist, never mind
> as a participant in their own lives.
>

Why atypical? Here most people who do not believe or strongly doubt
that Jesus is worth praying to just say so. There may be some who
pretend for whatever personal reasons but these are minority. What
is the point to pretend? Is there hope to cheat God somehow? Does
God like lies of courtesy? Most non-believers here try to be civil
about one's right to world view but consider worshipping deities more
or less kooky. So one claiming being Jew, Christian or Muslim is
likely actually believing God.

> > not because
> > there is some kind of science that shows that God actively did cause
> > floods or destruction of Pompeii or something.
>
> This is a naive form of Biblical literalism having nothing to do with Intelligent Design (ID)
> and not much to do with creationism. [Note, I wrote "creationism," not "creationists".]
>

Ok, I was overly sarcastic, sorry. There clearly were that kind of attempts
of "creation science". And that is actually science ... just bad, failed
science that found no much evidence but plenty of counter-evidence.

> > Catholics say that human
> > soul is made by God and is not natural process so beyond science.
>
> The soul isn't generally believed to be material. As such, it is outside the scope of ID.
>

Yet what most of the believers believe of God (or whatever they worship) seems
to be at that level of undetectable and non-material, capable of altering things
in unknown ways and having odd concept of perfection when dealing with material
world. Kind of what God in Futurama anime has:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edCqF_NtpOQ>
So try to detect acts of someone who considers perfect acts to be impossible to
notice.

> >
> > Also, how do "Certain features of the universe and of living things are best
> > explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process." and
> > “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” differ?
>
> The big difference is the word "God." All ID hypothesizes is a designer -- not even a creator.
> I have long written about the concept of a designer that naturally evolved in a far older
> and grander universe in the multiverse, and had the ability to manipulate the fundamental
> constants of a pre-Big-Bang mass of "stuff" to produce a much shorter-lived and
> smaller universe -- ours.
>

So you mean like Sir Arthur Clarke said that ... sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic? He was visionary gentlemen. He predicted geostationary
communication satellites more than decade before launch of Sputnik. But what believers
believe as Creator is typically not ancient (natural) wielder of super-technologies. God is
someone from undetectable dimensions beyond natural.

> I've started to look in detail at one modest approximation to such a grander universe
> on the following thread:
>
> Designer of Our Universe by the Back Door?
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/QflrDHqlDD0
> > Former is
> > just saying less than latter with more words.
>
> On the contrary, the former encompasses a much wider range of possibilities than
> the "God of the gaps". And it gets even broader when one considers such events
> as the production of the first prokaryotes, and the first eukaryotes reproducing via meiosis,
> and the Cambrian explosion. Each can be hypothesized as due to intelligent, technologically advanced
> motiles naturally evolved on an exoplanet -- just as YOU believe we evolved from prebiotic
> chemical compounds on earth.
>

I trust that there is/was actual manifesto with goal:
"To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that
nature and human beings are created by God"
Do you deny it? So the former sentence just carefully avoids saying out what was
actually meant. Rest of "ranges of possibilities" are mentioned as obfuscation.

> > >
> > The evolutionnews/discotute still do never publish any positive clams about
> > how, when and why anything happened.
>
> So what? I told Burkhard the following in the same post that I recalled for the lazy Daggett:
>
> "We have no idea how, when, and by what route the original human inhabitants of Madagascar got there; nor of how big the first wave was,
> nor whether there was a second wave, etc. The one thing we are sure of is that they came
> from Southeast Asia, probably Malaysia/Indonesia. All else is folklore with no written records."
>
> Nor, I might add, any artifacts that could be dated to the first century after the coming of
> the first arrivals -- whenever it was. Yet we know such things had to have existed.
> >What most important they still do never research it. Only obfuscation, denial and fake political promises.
> Pure hearsay on your part, and you don't even tell us where you got these ideas.
> Surely you aren't so naive as to base ANY of this on the undocumented ravings of Ron O.
>

But that does not fit as analogy. There are hypothetical concrete events, concrete place,
concrete doers, concrete reasons, concrete time estimates. However dim, inaccurate and
doubtful. But concrete.

> Minnich did research the Irreducible Complexity (IC) of one kind of bacterial flagellum.
> This is something that Judge Jones shoved down the memory hole of his wretched essay
> that he composed as a prelude to his Dover ruling, and which Ron O believes to be gospel truth.
>

Minnich did analyse what some proteins do and how lack of those damages the species.
Minnich did not analyse if, when and why these proteins were allegedly designed. Even
not how many times superficially similar but different flagella were "designed" in nature.
It was totally ordinary microbiology what Minnich did. And it did not show that those
can not evolve, just that if to remove a protein then the function of flagellum is damaged.

> You may retort that this was a far cry from showing that the flagellum was designed.
> However, many anti-ID zealots are afraid of admitting even this weak evidence for ID.
> Kenneth Miller in particular has made a big deal of trying to refute examples of IC,
> and has been made a celebrity by anti-ID zealots for these efforts.
>

I am ready to accept that hypothesis as one but there just are none said out. So when,
why, where, how many times different flagella were designed? Cite the explanation? There
won't be. There will be typical obfuscation and denial implying that "God musta done it"

> > Fake promises to find strong indications in natural world that there is God.
> ID theorists make no such promises. You have had the wool pulled over your eyes by Ron O--and who else?
>

By Wedge document. Download from discovery org
<https://www.discovery.org/m/2019/04/Wedge-Document-So-What.pdf>

> > To find those indications with science that they never do. How it is not scam?
> Such a fictitious combination of events *would* qualify as scam.
>

Yep. I think most sincere scientists and believers have distanced themselves from
it because of that it smells bad.

> If you deny that it is fictitious, please produce evidence.
>

Phillip E. Johnson: "The movement we now call the wedge made its public debut at
a conference of scientists and philosophers held at Southern Methodist University
in March 1992, following the publication of my book Darwin on Trial. The conference
brought together key wedge and intelligent design figures, particularly Michael
Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and myself."

> > How it does not hurt? So the Catholic Church stays wisely out of
> > such "scientific" arguments and debates.
> So does Behe and all the leading ID theorists. Refute this if you can -- I predict that you will be unable to do so.
>

Behe is still "fellow", Meyer "director" of "Center for Science and Culture", Dembski
has resigned, Johnson is dead. I do not actually understand ... what you deny?
Yes, lot of the supporters are scientists but they do not research design. Their
focus is on doubt and denial and even implied "therefore God musta done it" is
not said out.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I glossed over "as Church" last time, but the Roman Catholic Church
is literally "catholic" and keeps its official dogma to a bare minimum.
For instance, since Papal Infallibility was (unwisely, IMO) proclaimed
in the 19th Century, only two to three pronouncements of Popes have
been declared infallible: the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the
Assumption of Mary, and probably JPII's announcement that
the Church has not been authorized by God to make women priests.

Relevantly: Catholics are allowed to openly claim YEC fundamentalism
about Genesis 1 and 2 without being accused of heresy.
This also applies to the opposite extreme, what I call "neo-Deism":
the position that, after creating our universe just before the Big Bang,
God gave naturalistic forces a free hand until the time of Abraham or later,
when God finally intervened in our universe.

> > I see you have bought into the Ron O obsession with his chameleonic
> > speculation about the existence of a scam by the ID movement.
> > Rather than getting into its protean variations in this post, I'll be critiquing your idea of "that particular" scam.
> >
> Catholics do not of course say that it is "scam".

Scammers never say it is a scam, to begin with. But you may be saying
that Catholics don't say ID is a scam. That may be, but there is great hostility to ID
among Thomists, and perhaps other neo-Deist Catholics.
[I forget whether Kenneth Miller is a Catholic; he certainly comes across as a neo-Deist.]

At the opposite extreme, there is the Catholic ID theorist par excellence,
Michael Behe.

>They say something like
> that "ID is theological, not scientific theory and God as directly guiding
> hand behind evolutionary processes is "God of the gaps" argument."

Not necessarily a frequent guiding hand. But in any case, they
are oblivious of ID scientific theory, which makes no such specific
claims about the designer of any hypothesized design.

> But as teaching theological theories in public school is possible only
> in "comparison of religions" classes not in science classes then fooling
> people to think that there actually is science is scam.

Except that there IS science, in early embryonic form. It took secular
evolutionistic theory half a century to progress from Lamarck to Darwin,
and only half that many years have elapsed since Behe launched ID theory in earnest.


CONTINUED in next reply, to be done soon after I see that this one has appeared.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

This is the second of three or four replies to a long post.

On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
> On Wednesday, 3 May 2023 at 04:55:09 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:

> > > Most Catholics I know of (in our massively atheist country) say that they
> > > believe because they feel Jesus participating in their lives,
> >
> > You are seeing a highly atypical bunch of Evangelical missionaries.

You may not be literally seeing them, but if what you say is true,
the Catholics with whom you are acquainted are probably strongly influenced by them.

> > Most Catholics do not allege having such feelings. In fact, an
> > increasing percentage have even ceased to think of Jesus as more
> > than an admirable individual of our species. Already, a majority
> > no longer believe Jesus is present in the Holy Eucharist, never mind
> > as a participant in their own lives.
> >
> Why atypical?

The ones in Estonia are represented in a much greater proportion
of Catholics than in the USA; and the USA has a bigger proportion than
are in Western Europe.

> Here most people who do not believe or strongly doubt
> that Jesus is worth praying to just say so.

"worth praying to" is still typical of almost all Catholics, but
perhaps a majority feel that the benefit of praying is almost
completely psychological, rather than Jesus or God granting something
they ask for. A common rationalization of them and others is that
prayers are always answered: sometimes Yes, sometimes No, sometimes "Wait."

>There may be some who
> pretend for whatever personal reasons but these are minority.

You underestimate the power of peer pressure. There is an oft-repeated claim
that 70,000 pilgrims saw the sun dance at Fatima on October 13, 1917,
but I suspect that many of those 70,000 knew that it wasn't the sun they were seeing.
OTOH hardly any Catholic dares claim that what happened was not a miracle.

> What is the point to pretend? Is there hope to cheat God somehow? Does
> God like lies of courtesy?

Most Catholics don't think about these questions. Most of their
prayers are rote recitations: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, etc.
The only universal rote prayer of Evangelical Protestants is
the Our Father. They compose their prayers as they go along
for grace before meals, etc. Catholics almost always say
a rote prayer before meals, though the rote prayers of different
languages are different. [But the Hungarian is a literal translation of the German.]


More to the point of what you asked: here in talk.origins, many non-Christians
sneer about "lying for Jesus."

St. Francis de Sales had to condemn those Catholics who lie
in the process of arguing for the existence or various actions of God.

> Most non-believers here try to be civil
> about one's right to world view but consider worshipping deities more
> or less kooky.

That sounds like a holdover from the official atheism of the Soviet Union
with which generations of children were indoctrinated in schools for 70 years.

> So one claiming being Jew, Christian or Muslim is
> likely actually believing God.

Or may be like me, still hoping that there is a life after death
controlled by a benevolent deity, yet intellectually agnostic
(without admitting it to anyone, unlike me). I have a less
than 10% confidence that these hopes of mine conform to reality.
I have less than .01% confidence in the Thomistic notion of an
omnipotent, omniscient etc. God.

And yet I maintain my membership in the Roman Catholic Church,
because I am convinced that it offers the best chance of keeping those
hopes alive in future generations.


The theme of the rest of your reply shifted here, and I've deleted it.
I will reply to it later, before the weekend certainly, and perhaps today.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I am a day late, by some standards, with this second reply to a post by Daggett,
but I don't think he minds the resulting free time.

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 1:10:09 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:15:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:35:08 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > > On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> > > > > https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
> > > > >
> > > > > Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> > > > > about an ID scam that never existed.
> > > > The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
> > > > and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
> > > > sign of comprehending the first thing about.
> > > >
> > > > You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
> > > > had written such things as:
> > > >
> > > > ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
> > > > …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
> > > > =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================
>
> > > A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
> > > things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.

[snip of more recent text, dealt with in my first reply]

> > > In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.
>
> > She is honest about both things: the things that ID theorists
> > write about qua ID theorists, and the things to which Catholics
> > are dogmatically committed.
> >

> > If you can find a place in the article where [Gauger] confuses

> > the two issues, I'd certainly like to know about it.

> She appears to be honest about not asserting a false narrative
> that makes a fraudulent game of ignoring the reality of one
> while doing the other.

You need to do something about your habit of making
excruciatingly general abstract comments.
Even attentive readers could have a hard time
figuring out what on earth you are talking about here.

> But I have to wonder at your apparent
> attempt to twist in an insinuation that I questioned her honesty
> as I was applauding it.

Not only do you NOT "have to wonder at," but wondering is tantamount
to flirting with the (malicious-seeming) sophistry embodied in the rest of your sentence.

Were there normal adult give-and-take between us [as I had fervently hoped there would be]
the most natural interpretation of my words would be the correct one: I thought you
had read Gauger's sentence a bit hastily, and inferred a connection between the
part before the dash and the part after the dash that wasn't there,

> > > It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief
> > > system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
> > > just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.
>
> > You obviously didn't read far enough to see what I wrote about to your buddy Burkhard:


> As usual, you do not accomplish what you imagine you do.

As usual against me, you are guilty of false advertisement on two counts. The first is your "As usual"
and the second is the rest of the claim. I can't prove a negative (in the technical legal sense of the term0
but the second half is demonstrably false.

> Not only would your claim below be irrelevant if it were true, it's dubious as well.

More false advertising.

> You addressed the argument to Burkhard so I didn't jump in to refute you.

Neither did jillery: she jumped in to do a massive snip of what I had written
"to make it mean something different," to use Harshman's turn of phrase,
in another thread late last week.

> You're tried to argue the point with him before,

Your "the point" is a grand equivocation. I did not talk about "theory"
or "thesis" in the way I did in the part you had snipped earlier:

[repeated from far below:]

> > _________________________ repost of snipped text___________________
> > I told Burkhard last month about a theory that Behe built about the limitations
> > of mutation, especially where the malaria parasite is concerned:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/aEWcwKdnhaY/m/b3QDSySsAAAJ
> > Re: steady state theory of biological origin
> > Apr 18, 2023, 10:20:25 PM
> > Behe did this in the book, _The_Edge_of_Evolution_, which Ron O shows
> > no signs of ever [having] heard about.
> >
> > +++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of repost +++++++++++++++

> and I think you failed.

You can think anything you want, but here you are guilty of wishful thinking.

> Moreover, you abandoned the argument when you cited chapter and verse examples
> of how you were mistaken.

This makes no sense at all, and I am calling your bluff: DOCMENT where I did the
thing to which you are referring.

>Your response was to repeat your ad hominen
> claim that he is a "scientific non-entity" (with the implied self-aggrandized
> implication that you are his superior).

That's not self-aggrandizement, that's damning myself with faint praise.

>
> I don't know if he wants anyone to jump in and dispute you. So far, every
> time he has bothered he's torn you to shreds

Polemically, with condescending insults even worse than calling
him a scientific nonentity: mine can be refuted if false,
his are so generic that they put me in the task of "proving a negative."

> and you've ignored those
> posts and started all over again in different threads.

Not all over again: continuing my replies to earlier posts
before tackling the replies to my earlier replies.

Unlike you and Burkhard, I do not have the luxury of being
in heated dispute with only one person who is regularly set upon by others;
with me, the whole situation is reversed.

So I need to set priorities, and I put most of them into debates
where there is some hope of getting new scientific or philosophical
insights.The two of you are far down the list. Even Mark Isaak's
discussion with me about miracles and the reliability of Biblical accounts
was more productive than what I get from the two of you most of the time.

>
> By your own methods, if I had jumped in to expose where I thought
> your lines of argument were wrong, you would have retorted with
> complaints about people teaming up to pick on you.

You are repeating a popular canard without basis in fact, and bordering on libel
on account of insinuating that it is triggered by mere disagreement.

> Between that
> and Burkhard being quite capable of exposing where you were wrong,
>I figured the best move was to just go buy some popcorn and enjoy the show.

You sure are humble. Everyone could learn a lesson from the humility
with which you respond to people.

The preceding paragraph is a close paraphrase of something you wrote about me this year.
I suspected it was sarcastic, even though the words of mine that elicited it were much more modest.

So I gave you the benefit of the doubt, beginning with "Perhaps ..."
and I'm glad I did, because it earned for me a nice compliment from Hemidactylus,
even though he ordinarily behaves like an adversary of mine, and a good buddy of yourself and Burkhard.

>The only reason I hedge on this now is that if I had come back
> from 3 weeks hiking around Corfu I might size up the significance
> (more properly the lack of significance) of your attacks and just ignore
> them until I had some important article to avoid writing.

Rational refutations of on-topic errors are not attacks. See below to understand
the difference, if you are capable of such understanding.

> > _________________________ repost of snipped text___________________
> > I told Burkhard last month about a theory that Behe built about the limitations
> > of mutation, especially where the malaria parasite is concerned:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/aEWcwKdnhaY/m/b3QDSySsAAAJ
> > Re: steady state theory of biological origin
> > Apr 18, 2023, 10:20:25 PM
> > Behe did this in the book, _The_Edge_of_Evolution_, which Ron O shows
> > no signs of ever [having] heard about.
> >
> > +++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of repost +++++++++++++++
> >
> > How well do you know that book? Burkhard showed how little he understood
> > about it in the text I preserved in the linked post.

<crickets>

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Mark Isaak]

I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for
Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,
touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't be.

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[Öö Tiib]

On Thursday, 4 May 2023 at 16:55:13 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
>

I just cut out what I do not feel to have knowledge to respond ... to shorten
it a bit.

> Relevantly: Catholics are allowed to openly claim YEC fundamentalism
> about Genesis 1 and 2 without being accused of heresy.
> This also applies to the opposite extreme, what I call "neo-Deism":
> the position that, after creating our universe just before the Big Bang,
> God gave naturalistic forces a free hand until the time of Abraham or later,
> when God finally intervened in our universe.
>

Wisely so. All the story of 20 generations from Adam to Abraham is in
disagreement with every evidence we can find on this planet. If such or close
enough events took place then (A) not here and/or (B) someone has been
faking every rock of this planet down to molecular level. It is only sane to
say that rocks do not lie and ... so we perhaps do not understand the message
in book correctly (if there is one).

> > Catholics do not of course say that it is "scam".
>
> Scammers never say it is a scam, to begin with. But you may be saying
> that Catholics don't say ID is a scam. That may be, but there is great hostility to ID
> among Thomists, and perhaps other neo-Deist Catholics.
> [I forget whether Kenneth Miller is a Catholic; he certainly comes across as a neo-Deist.]
>
> At the opposite extreme, there is the Catholic ID theorist par excellence,
> Michael Behe.
>

Competing ideas between members of Church indicate that it is capable to evolve.
I meant that Catholics (regardless if opposing ID or supporting it regardless if sincere
or scammers) do avoid calling it "that particular scam" like I did. For me ID hope to
have science is likely sincere ... but claiming there already is something to teach is
scam.

> > But as teaching theological theories in public school is possible only
> > in "comparison of religions" classes not in science classes then fooling
> > people to think that there actually is science is scam.
>
> Except that there IS science, in early embryonic form. It took secular
> evolutionistic theory half a century to progress from Lamarck to Darwin,
> and only half that many years have elapsed since Behe launched ID theory in earnest.
>

These last 3 decades have turned molecular biology from quite an hack into applied
technical science.
Other wannabe sciences (like ghost hunting, ancient astronauts or cryptozoology)
can be in better state than ID. Anyone who searches and researches can find
something. But these do not pretend that they have something to teach.

Snipping part where you explain tendencies and reasoning behind main-stream
Catholic world view, thank you.

> > Most non-believers here try to be civil
> > about one's right to world view but consider worshipping deities more
> > or less kooky.
>

> That sounds like a holdover from the official atheism of the Soviet Union
> with which generations of children were indoctrinated in schools for 70 years.
>

Communists had control here 47 - 50 years (depending on definition of "control").
We did exist before Soviet Union. We did exist before Christians. We were last
corner of Europe that crusaders could conquer. What we have learned ... their
deities do not aid them. Also their bigger ships, higher titles, metal armours
and bigger numbers can be dealt with. Each time we lost because our leaders
were fooled. Only thing of value is wisdom. Any loss is actual only when one
fails to learn from it. How could communists teach us? They were mostly
illiterate farmers, soldiers and labourers. And ID is similar to Lysenkoism of
communists, denial of actual science.

> > So one claiming being Jew, Christian or Muslim is
> > likely actually believing God.
>

> Or may be like me, still hoping that there is a life after death
> controlled by a benevolent deity, yet intellectually agnostic
> (without admitting it to anyone, unlike me). I have a less
> than 10% confidence that these hopes of mine conform to reality.
> I have less than .01% confidence in the Thomistic notion of an
> omnipotent, omniscient etc. God.
>

I also do not know if there are or not beings from whatever yet unknown
dimensions, souls connected to such dimensions, afterlife, rebirth
whatever. That kind of extraordinary claims are present in different religions
very differently, evidence is close to none plus ID does not research such
things.

But lets say there is something. What should Maker of this Universe who ...
for example ... decided to connect immortal souls to some interesting
"meat" here think about ID? ID technically claims in majority of its
"evidences" (#3 - #6 of top six) that terraforming and populating a tiny
piece of rock with that weird "meat" took 4 billions of years of tinkering?

I would be insulted if so low performance was attributed to me while my
actual two great engineering achievements were under doubt. (A) making
universe where such meat can fully boot-strap all on its own and (B)
connecting souls to it.

> And yet I maintain my membership in the Roman Catholic Church,
> because I am convinced that it offers the best chance of keeping those
> hopes alive in future generations.
>

I am more worried that we argue about things we do not know and leave
a world where it is impossible to live to our future generations. Hopes to
proceed to some other dimensions (or to spread in this one) are none
for generations that can not exist.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
[...]

> > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> >>> https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
> >>>
> >>> Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> >>> about an ID scam that never existed.
> >> The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
> >> and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
> >> sign of comprehending the first thing about.
> >>
> >> You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
> >> had written such things as:
> >>
> >> ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
> >> …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
> >> =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

<everything from Lawyer Daggett snipped, having already been replied to by me>

I see you had nothing to say about it here, Mark.

> I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for
> Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,

I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute?
"Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.

> touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
> why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
> original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

Thanks for letting us know about this, even though it has nothing to do
with Intelligent Design (ID) and is not even claiming GodDidIt.
However, it is relevant to Catholic dogma about the Fall,
which is rather modest: it ascribes the Fall to a group of humans,
not necessarily two in number nor closely related.

> Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't be.

Agreed on that last sentence, even though you were probably sarcastic.

Do you recall what other details the blub gave about this possibility?
Anthropologists have long written about two actual individuals:
Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. By definition,
all living humans trace their ancestry via an unbroken maternal
line to Mitochondrial Eve and via an unbroken paternal line to Y-Chromosomal Adam.

The full definition adds the following: it entails that Mitochondrial Eve
had at least two daughters who have both left female descendants today,
and that Y-Chromosomal Adam had at least two sons, both of whom have
male descendants today -- both via unbroken lines involving only women and men, respectively.


Curiously enough, we have a rather precise date for Mitochondrial Eve -- roughly 155,000 years
ago -- while the estimates for Y-Chromosomal Adam range widely:

"As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[5]."
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

I won't speculate here on the possible reasons for this discrepancy, but
rather talk about a possibility that occurred to me about an hour ago.
It envisioned Mitochondrial Eve having all her children from one
"purebred" descendant of Y-Chromosomal Adam. If that happened,
we would all be descendants of this one couple.

I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what
Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was
broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

[John Harshman]

While true, that has nothing to do with Gauger's claim. mtEve is the
ancestor only of your mitochondrial genome, and Y-Adam is the ancestor
only of your Y chromosome. Their existence has nothing to do with a
population of 2 only.

> I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what
> Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
> Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was
> broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.

mtEve has nothing to do with biblical Eve or with a population of 2 as
in Gauger's assertion. And her calculation ignores the genes (MHC,
mostly) for which we share at least 5 conserved alleles with other primates.

[Lawyer Daggett]

mtEve and Y-Adam never met, and never had any children together, and
are not a point of genetic restriction from which all of our genes flowed.
If Gauger implied otherwise, rather than being misrepresented, I'll have
to modify my earlier comments about her seeming honest with some
bits about extreme incompetence. I'll add, please don't make me bring
out lineages of HLA types, cytP450s, immunoglobin and t-cell receptor
alleles. Those papers are buried in boxes in a storage unit from before
pdfs were easily obtained (and they aren't so easy for me to get anymore).

[John Harshman]

Why, Lawyer Daggett. Are you secretly Molecular Geneticist Daggett?

Now, if I recall, Gauger used population genetic data to estimate the
limits on human population size at various times and discvered that the
95% confidence limit included "2" if you go back at least 500,000 years.
As far as I know, this result is correct (again, if you ignore alleles
that are conserved across species).

Nothing do do with anything Peter is talking about, which as far as I
know is also nothing Gauger mentioned.

[Lawyer Daggett]

Sure, as long as you ignore the data that completely destroys the results
of a trite methodology, you can pretend the trite methodology gave a
sensible result.

I am also algorithm developer Daggett. I am large, I contain multitudes.
Far too many methods used in the broad field of bioinformatics use
spherical cow approximations. Far too few apply reality checks to their
algorithms, and the use of published algorithms.

This used to matter to me when I had an interest in HLA/MHC types
and subtype specificity related to vaccine design and optimization
of pre-clinical trial design using macaques as a model species. But
that now seems like a lifetime ago.

Just to drop a bomb, one of the problems with the simplistic algorithms
is that they don't account for a strong positive selection for diversity
in certain genes. And it isn't trivial to do so.

[John Harshman]

It's not a problem for the bulk of the data just to assume neutrality,
and that's not a bad way to estimate past population sizes. Only a
comparatively small number of sites are being maintained by selection,
and an even smaller amount of allelic diversity is being maintained by
balancing selection. No need to take that into account when estimating
past population sizes. What it can do is increase the minimum possible
population size. But is such a small bottleneck even credible, even if
it were technically consistent with the data? Almost certainly not. The
most likely outcome of an extreme bottleneck is extinction.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

Yes. If we discount highly untypical periods like the 19th century, a
typical woman has had at most three surviving daughters. A man, on the
other hand, will have had zero surviving sons in most cases, and up to
200 in extreme cases. It follws that Y-chromosome Adam lived much more
recently than mitochondrial Eve, so they could not have met.

> If Gauger implied otherwise, rather than being misrepresented, I'll have
> to modify my earlier comments about her seeming honest with some
> bits about extreme incompetence. I'll add, please don't make me bring
> out lineages of HLA types, cytP450s, immunoglobin and t-cell receptor
> alleles. Those papers are buried in boxes in a storage unit from before
> pdfs were easily obtained (and they aren't so easy for me to get anymore).

--
athel cb : Biochemical Evolution, Garland Science, 2016

[broger...@gmail.com]

..................................

> This used to matter to me when I had an interest in HLA/MHC types
> and subtype specificity related to vaccine design and optimization
> of pre-clinical trial design using macaques as a model species. But
> that now seems like a lifetime ago.

We really overlap quite a bit. In the late 90's I was working on malaria vaccines using rhesus macaques as the model system. Since we were trying to induce CD8 T cell responses we had to think about how to get assays that would work without having to MHC type each individual animal. We ended up using pooled peptides from regions in the vaccine antigen that looked like they would have lots of different MHC Class I epitopes. It worked pretty well. I was glad to be done with it, though. First, macaques seem a little too human for me to feel really comfortable caging them and doing experiments on them. Second, the results in macaques didn't predict later results in humans terribly well. And, third, knowing that the wrong contact with their spit could be fatal makes working with them somewhat high stress.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Harshman talks below about "Gauger's claim/assertion," but it appears
that all he has to go on is a blurb which I scrutinize below before
going on to address his comments.

On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 2:05:12 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:

> On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:

> >> I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for
> >> Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,
> >
> > I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute?
> > "Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.

Mark hasn't replied to my post, so I looked it up: CSC is a part of DI,
but it would be out of character for Evolution News to publish a blurb like the following:

> >> touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
> >> why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
> >> original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

The person responsible for that blurb is giving a popularization of Gauger's conclusions
which I doubt that a biologist of her intelligence would have made.


<snip for focus>

> > Anthropologists have long written about two actual individuals:
> > Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. By definition,
> > all living humans trace their ancestry via an unbroken maternal
> > line to Mitochondrial Eve and via an unbroken paternal line to Y-Chromosomal Adam.
> >
> > The full definition adds the following: it entails that Mitochondrial Eve
> > had at least two daughters who have both left female descendants today,
> > and that Y-Chromosomal Adam had at least two sons, both of whom have
> > male descendants today -- both via unbroken lines involving only women and men, respectively.
> >
> >
> > Curiously enough, we have a rather precise date for Mitochondrial Eve -- roughly 155,000 years
> > ago -- while the estimates for Y-Chromosomal Adam range widely:
> >
> > "As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[5]."
> > -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam
> >
> > I won't speculate here on the possible reasons for this discrepancy, but
> > rather talk about a possibility that occurred to me about an hour ago.
> > It envisioned Mitochondrial Eve having all her children from one
> > "purebred" descendant of Y-Chromosomal Adam. If that happened,
> > we would all be descendants of this one couple.

One problem with posting ideas that are an hour old is that one
does not think through all the ramifications. The clause "If that happened"
depends ONLY on Eve having been monogamous, and the whole possibility is quite remote,
and gets more and more remote the further you get away from Mitochondrial Eve
and Y-Chromosome Adam -- and just look at the discrepancy in the dating above!


Now we come to your words, John:

> While true, that has nothing to do with Gauger's claim.

We ARE all descended from that one couple if Eve was monogamous, but that is solely
due to Mitochondrial Eve being one of the members of that couple, unless Y-Chromosome
Adam was one of her descendants -- unlikely given the dates in Wikipedia.

> mtEve is the ancestor only of your mitochondrial genome, and Y-Adam is the ancestor
> only of your Y chromosome.

You forgot to precede this autistic digression with something like
"In the sense of population genetics" or words to that effect.

By the way, could you give a scientific source for the bold word "only"?
Do you really think that we have NO alleles in our nuclear genome from mtEve?

> Their existence has nothing to do with a population of 2 only.

See what I wrote above about that amateurish blurb.

> > I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what
> > Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
> > Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was
> > broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.

> mtEve has nothing to do with biblical Eve or with a population of 2 as
> in Gauger's assertion.

See again what I wrote about the blurb.

> And her calculation ignores the genes (MHC,
> mostly) for which we share at least 5 conserved alleles with other primates.

You write here as though you had read the relevant part of Gauger's book.
How do you even know the calculations were hers? She might have
just been citing the research that led to the definitions of mtEve and Y-Adam,
for all I know, and reasoned about human ancestry
in the ordinary sense of ancestry, just as I did.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 5/8/23 10:05 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Harshman talks below about "Gauger's claim/assertion," but it appears
> that all he has to go on is a blurb which I scrutinize below before
> going on to address his comments.
>
> On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 2:05:12 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>
>>>> I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for
>>>> Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,
>>>
>>> I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute?
>>> "Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.
>
> Mark hasn't replied to my post, so I looked it up: CSC is a part of DI,
> but it would be out of character for Evolution News to publish a blurb like the following:
>
>>>> touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
>>>> why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
>>>> original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.
>
> The person responsible for that blurb is giving a popularization of Gauger's conclusions
> which I doubt that a biologist of her intelligence would have made.

You are free to doubt, but that is indeed the point of her study, to
demonstrate that the data do not rule out a very ancient (>500,000
years) population size of two.

You blur the distinction between "all descended" and "all solely
descended". Gauger is referring to the latter: a total human population
size of two, long in the past. That far in the past would in fact
pre-date both mtEve and Y-Adam.

>> mtEve is the ancestor only of your mitochondrial genome, and Y-Adam is the ancestor
>> only of your Y chromosome.
>
> You forgot to precede this autistic digression with something like
> "In the sense of population genetics" or words to that effect.

Sure. I refer to genetic inheritance, not genealogy.

> By the way, could you give a scientific source for the bold word "only"?
> Do you really think that we have NO alleles in our nuclear genome from mtEve?

There is of course no way to say. It's just statistically unlikely,
given the presumed size of the ancient population (much greater than
two) and the way in which genetic material is, over the short term,
inherited in large blocks. The majority of ancestors are squeezed out of
your genome within a few generations.

>> Their existence has nothing to do with a population of 2 only.
>
> See what I wrote above about that amateurish blurb.

That blurb is an accurate reflection of Gauger's study.

>>> I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what
>>> Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
>>> Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was
>>> broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.
>
>> mtEve has nothing to do with biblical Eve or with a population of 2 as
>> in Gauger's assertion.
>
> See again what I wrote about the blurb.

See again.

>> And her calculation ignores the genes (MHC,
>> mostly) for which we share at least 5 conserved alleles with other primates.
>
> You write here as though you had read the relevant part of Gauger's book.
> How do you even know the calculations were hers? She might have
> just been citing the research that led to the definitions of mtEve and Y-Adam,
> for all I know, and reasoned about human ancestry
> in the ordinary sense of ancestry, just as I did.

Again, Gauger's study had exactly nothing to do with mtEVe or Y-Adam. It
was all about the degree to which the population-genetic data constrain
estimates of past population size. And the study was indeed conducted by
Gauger.

[John Harshman]

On 5/8/23 10:05 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

Not the book, exactly. Here:

https://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2019.1

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 10:47:00 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
> On Thursday, 4 May 2023 at 16:55:13 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
> >
> I just cut out what I do not feel to have knowledge to respond ... to shorten
> it a bit.

Very good.

> > Relevantly: Catholics are allowed to openly claim YEC fundamentalism
> > about Genesis 1 and 2 without being accused of heresy.
> > This also applies to the opposite extreme, what I call "neo-Deism":
> > the position that, after creating our universe just before the Big Bang,
> > God gave naturalistic forces a free hand until the time of Abraham or later,
> > when God finally intervened in our universe.
> >
> Wisely so. All the story of 20 generations from Adam to Abraham is in
> disagreement with every evidence we can find on this planet. If such or close
> enough events took place then (A) not here and/or (B) someone has been
> faking every rock of this planet down to molecular level. It is only sane to
> say that rocks do not lie and ... so we perhaps do not understand the message
> in book correctly (if there is one).

On this, we are in full agreement. The relevant disputes in which ID theorists
are engaged follow the scientifically estimated ages of the earth. Some, including Behe,
explicitly agree with common physical descent of all known earth organisms;
the other leaders (including Meyer and Dembski) are careful not to contradict this,
but neither do all publicly endorse it like Behe does.

> > > Catholics do not of course say that it is "scam".
> >
> > Scammers never say it is a scam, to begin with. But you may be saying
> > that Catholics don't say ID is a scam. That may be, but there is great hostility to ID
> > among Thomists, and perhaps other neo-Deist Catholics.
> > [I forget whether Kenneth Miller is a Catholic; he certainly comes across as a neo-Deist.]
> >
> > At the opposite extreme, there is the Catholic ID theorist par excellence,
> > Michael Behe.
> >
> Competing ideas between members of Church indicate that it is capable to evolve.
> I meant that Catholics (regardless if opposing ID or supporting it regardless if sincere
> or scammers) do avoid calling it "that particular scam" like I did. For me ID hope to
> have science is likely sincere ... but claiming there already is something to teach is
> scam.

Now you are getting close to RonO's scam, which consists of alleging
that there was some claim by ID leaders to have an *alternative* to neo-Darwinian
theory in a form able to replace it on the secondary school level.

This is what Ron O called the "bait" portion of a "bait and switch scam".
I've challenged him many times over the last dozen years to provide
documentation of the existence of any such "bait," and he never
came close to providing any.

> > > But as teaching theological theories in public school is possible only
> > > in "comparison of religions" classes not in science classes then fooling
> > > people to think that there actually is science is scam.

> > Except that there IS science, in early embryonic form. It took secular
> > evolutionistic theory half a century to progress from Lamarck to Darwin,
> > and only half that many years have elapsed since Behe launched ID theory in earnest.
> >
> These last 3 decades have turned molecular biology from quite an hack into applied
> technical science.

Behe has kept largely abreast of that in the books _The Edge of Evolution_
and _Darwin Devolves_. He specializes in biochemistry and is well versed in molecular biology.

> Other wannabe sciences (like ghost hunting, ancient astronauts or cryptozoology)
> can be in better state than ID.

Never! These have no theory, only a few fleeting alleged sightings and faked/mis-identified photos.

I have made a comparison between the Big Bang theory and Behe's theory of
the limitations of mutation in producing highly novel organisms.
The Big Bang theory is far deeper into physics and advanced mathematics
than anyone reading just textbooks would suspect.
I told this to Burkhard, and I'll be explaining it in reply to you.
Behe's theory is on a much more accessible level, but it still takes some effort to grasp it.

>Anyone who searches and researches can find
> something. But these do not pretend that they have something to teach.

You need to get specific about the "teach" part. Ron O routinely indulges
in very general equivocations that make him almost impossible to pin down,
somewhat like Marc Verhaegan. I told you above about the specifics on which his allegations of "bait" rest.

>
> Snipping part where you explain tendencies and reasoning behind main-stream
> Catholic world view, thank you.

You're most sincerely welcome.

> > > Most non-believers here try to be civil
> > > about one's right to world view but consider worshipping deities more
> > > or less kooky.
> >
> > That sounds like a holdover from the official atheism of the Soviet Union
> > with which generations of children were indoctrinated in schools for 70 years.
> >
> Communists had control here 47 - 50 years (depending on definition of "control").
> We did exist before Soviet Union. We did exist before Christians. We were last
> corner of Europe that crusaders could conquer. What we have learned ... their
> deities do not aid them. Also their bigger ships, higher titles, metal armours
> and bigger numbers can be dealt with. Each time we lost because our leaders
> were fooled. Only thing of value is wisdom. Any loss is actual only when one
> fails to learn from it. How could communists teach us? They were mostly
> illiterate farmers, soldiers and labourers.

The teaching was done in mandatory primary and secondary education,
and certainly not by illiterates. When children shocked their parents about
the atheistic indoctrination, the parents were in a terrible dilemma: if they
argued about what the children had been taught, they took the risk of
the children telling the teachers about it, and then all hell could break loose.

We're seeing an analogue in teachers here in the USA catering to any sign
of gender dysphoria in their pupils and being forbidden to let the parents know about it.

> And ID is similar to Lysenkoism of
> communists, denial of actual science.

Not of actual data, only of actual hypothesizing, and especially theorizing.
The main dispute is whether natural selection [confined to competition WITHIN populations!]
and mutation are adequate to account for the immense variety
and richness of earth's biota. Many mainline evolutionists, hostile to ID,
are very critical of this foundation of what is called "neo-Darwinism" and
"The Modern Synthesis." They just seek different remedies than ID does.


Remainder deleted, to be replied to after I post the next (and last? I don't know yet)
installment of replies to your long post of May 3. I hope to have time for that installment
later today, but if so, you are only likely to see it tomorrow.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

University of So. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Monday, May 8, 2023 at 1:47:36 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 5/8/23 10:05 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Harshman talks below about "Gauger's claim/assertion," but it appears
> > that all he has to go on is a blurb which I scrutinize below before
> > going on to address his comments.

You showed otherwise, John, but you are still being misleading below.

> > On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 2:05:12 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>> On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >
> >>>> I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for
> >>>> Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,
> >>>
> >>> I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute?
> >>> "Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.
> >
> > Mark hasn't replied to my post, so I looked it up: CSC is a part of DI,
> > but it would be out of character for Evolution News to publish a blurb like the following:
> >
> >>>> touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
> >>>> why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
> >>>> original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.
> >
> > The person responsible for that blurb is giving a popularization of Gauger's conclusions
> > which I doubt that a biologist of her intelligence would have made.

Specifically, the word "original" is misleading.

> You are free to doubt, but that is indeed the point of her study, to
> demonstrate that the data do not rule out a very ancient (>500,000
> years) population size of two.

You aren't paying attention to the word "original." What she and
her co-author write about in the article that you linked is very different
from what the blurb suggests. The title of the article is also misleading:

Hössjer O, Gauger A (2019) A single-couple human origin is possible. BIO-Complexity 2019 (1):1- ¨ 20. doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2019.1.
https://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2019.1/BIO-C.2019.1

The article is about not ruling out the existence of 2-individual "bottlenecks",
and that can mean two very different things:
a pair of individuals that begin a new species, and a pair of individuals
that are the sole breeding survivors of a collapse in the population of a species.
The California condor came close to this point a half century or so ago.

Their article is very technical, but this much is easy to see on a first skimming.
The first possibility is what a literal reading of the blurb, and of Genesis 2 (NOT Genesis 1!) gives.
The second is very different, and is the one I think most likely if indeed there was such a "bottleneck".

How about you?


Remainder deleted, to be replied to later this week. I have lots of loose ends to tie up in t.o. and s.b.p,
in addition to family and research constraints.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

Genetically speaking, the two cases are identical. But a careful reading
of the paper will show that Gauger is most interested in the case of a
population of two with no precursors. This is an attempt to legitimize
the scientific plausibility of an original, created pair.

[DB Cates]

And, of course, none of this has anything to do with mtEve and/or YAdam
as they are much more recent than any proposed bottleneck.

>> Remainder deleted, to be replied to later this week. I have lots  of
>> loose ends to tie up in t.o. and s.b.p,
>> in addition to family and research constraints.
>>
>>
>> Peter Nyikos
>> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics   -- standard disclaimer--
>> Univ. of So. Carolina at Columbia
>> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos
>>
>

--
--
Don Cates ("he's a cunning rascal" PN)

[peter2...@gmail.com]

You ducked the question. Don't you realize how difficult it is to argue for the first possibility?

> Genetically speaking, the two cases are identical.

That's a pseudoscientific sentence. Here's a scientific one:

"If we confine ourselves to genetics, the two cases are indistinguishable."

Note, "indistinguishable," not "identical." You wouldn't say,
"Speaking of naked-eye optics, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B are identical."


The two possibilities are easily distinguishable, given the right fossils.
In fact, fossils have been used for something like a century and a half
to discredit the first possibility. [See also the Quote of the Day at the end, from even earlier.]

>But a careful reading
> of the paper will show that Gauger is most interested in the case of a
> population of two with no precursors.

You keep suppressing the existence of the co-author. Note the order in which
the names appear in the webpage you linked:

[repeated from earlier text, above]

> > Hössjer O, Gauger A (2019) A single-couple human origin is possible. BIO-Complexity 2019 (1):1- ¨ 20. doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2019.1.
> > https://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2019.1/BIO-C.2019.1

Perhaps the most important work on that 18 (or 19?) author paper in PNAS was NOT
by the first author (Harshman, J.), eh? :-)

I'd like to see the reasoning (or wishful thinking) behind what you say about "a careful reading,"
and why you credit Gauger with the alleged "most interest."


Wishful thinking is obviously behind the "created" in your next sentence:

> This is an attempt to legitimize
> the scientific plausibility of an original, created pair.

You are mind-reading one of the co-authors in a most crass way.
Even if one or both of them were most interested in the the first alternative,
a more likely motivation is that they had already co-authored at least two
earlier papers on the same general subject.

You evidently missed references 20 and 21 in your "careful reading" of the paper.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.
—Georges Cuvier

[John Harshman]

It's difficult to argue for either, and the data Gauger used would not
distinguish them.

>> Genetically speaking, the two cases are identical.
>
> That's a pseudoscientific sentence. Here's a scientific one:
>
> "If we confine ourselves to genetics, the two cases are indistinguishable."
>
> Note, "indistinguishable," not "identical." You wouldn't say,
> "Speaking of naked-eye optics, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B are identical."

I don't think the two sentences are at all comparable, but since we
agree on the intended meaning I see no reason to belabor this.

> The two possibilities are easily distinguishable, given the right fossils.
> In fact, fossils have been used for something like a century and a half
> to discredit the first possibility. [See also the Quote of the Day at the end, from even earlier.]

You will note that I have also pointed to genetic data that
distinguishes the scenarios, just not data used by Gauger. Let's face
it, a comparison of any part of the human and chimp genomes kills off
the first option, which is all about fiat creation of Adam and Eve.

> >But a careful reading
>> of the paper will show that Gauger is most interested in the case of a
>> population of two with no precursors.
>
> You keep suppressing the existence of the co-author. Note the order in which
> the names appear in the webpage you linked:

Yes. But the original topic was Gauger's book, so she seems like the
author to emphasize here. Why is this important? Why all these side issues?

> [repeated from earlier text, above]
>>> Hössjer O, Gauger A (2019) A single-couple human origin is possible. BIO-Complexity 2019 (1):1- ¨ 20. doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2019.1.
>>> https://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2019.1/BIO-C.2019.1
>
> Perhaps the most important work on that 18 (or 19?) author paper in PNAS was NOT
> by the first author (Harshman, J.), eh? :-)

What point are you trying to make here?

> I'd like to see the reasoning (or wishful thinking) behind what you say about "a careful reading,"
> and why you credit Gauger with the alleged "most interest."

I'd like you to try reading what the article says.

> Wishful thinking is obviously behind the "created" in your next sentence:

Have you read the article?

>> This is an attempt to legitimize
>> the scientific plausibility of an original, created pair.
>
> You are mind-reading one of the co-authors in a most crass way.
> Even if one or both of them were most interested in the the first alternative,
> a more likely motivation is that they had already co-authored at least two
> earlier papers on the same general subject.
>
> You evidently missed references 20 and 21 in your "careful reading" of the paper.

There's a common motivation for all those. Why are you so anxious to
ignore the authors' creationism. I direct your attention to references
17-19.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:

Unexpected events have essentially pushed my posting schedule
over by one day. I won't have time to reply in detail to your post until this evening,
so you probably won't read that until tomorrow. I'll just remark on one thing you wrote below,
after an important message.

I gave Marc Verhaegan a virtual tongue-lashing for the disgraceful way he was
treating you in s.b.p. on April 28. I only saw it this week, and you may no longer be
looking at that thread, so here is a link to my reply to that:

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/3S-5EpiWkmg/m/kAUd340bBAAJ
Re: Human & ape evolution
May 8, 2023, 9:11:45 PM

I'm just about fed up with him, and I told him so at the end.

> On Wednesday, 3 May 2023 at 04:55:09 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:

> > > there is some kind of science that shows that God actively did cause
> > > floods or destruction of Pompeii or something.
> >
> > This is a naive form of Biblical literalism having nothing to do with Intelligent Design (ID)
> > and not much to do with creationism. [Note, I wrote "creationism," not "creationists".]
> >
> Ok, I was overly sarcastic, sorry. There clearly were that kind of attempts
> of "creation science". And that is actually science ... just bad, failed
> science that found no much evidence but plenty of counter-evidence.

This is in line with the way I talked yesterday about the huge gulf between
ID and e.g. cryptozoology as far as any scientific nature goes. This creation science is
exactly like you say; but ID has not failed insofar as it sticks to the methodology
of science. Behe and Minnich are good examples of some limited success,
and I'll tell you about that in an evening post.


<remainder snipped , to be replied to later>

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Picking up where I left off earlier today:

On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
> On Wednesday, 3 May 2023 at 04:55:09 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:

> > > Catholics say that human
> > > soul is made by God and is not natural process so beyond science.
> >
> > The soul isn't generally believed to be material. As such, it is outside the scope of ID.
> >
> Yet what most of the believers believe of God (or whatever they worship) seems
> to be at that level of undetectable and non-material, capable of altering things
> in unknown ways and having odd concept of perfection when dealing with material
> world. Kind of what God in Futurama anime has:
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edCqF_NtpOQ>
> So try to detect acts of someone who considers perfect acts to be impossible to
> notice.

That is the traditional view that you see most often, but I told you about
what my ideas on what a designer of our universe earlier; see below.

> > >
> > > Also, how do "Certain features of the universe and of living things are best
> > > explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process." and
> > > “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” differ?
> >
> > The big difference is the word "God." All ID hypothesizes is a designer -- not even a creator.
> > I have long written about the concept of a designer that naturally evolved in a far older
> > and grander universe in the multiverse, and had the ability to manipulate the fundamental
> > constants of a pre-Big-Bang mass of "stuff" to produce a much shorter-lived and
> > smaller universe -- ours.
> >
> So you mean like Sir Arthur Clarke said that ... sufficiently advanced technology is
> indistinguishable from magic?

Yes, except that this technology is not of our world, but the world of the designer.
Still, I envision it to be subject to natural laws that hold like ours do in our world.

>He was visionary gentlemen. He predicted geostationary
> communication satellites more than decade before launch of Sputnik. But what believers
> believe as Creator is typically not ancient (natural) wielder of super-technologies. God is
> someone from undetectable dimensions beyond natural.

Yes, I am a pioneer who is exploring another possibility, one amenable to reasoning
by ourselves to a modest extent. OTOH the typical belief does not give much to reason about in a scientific vein.
Most reasoning that does take place is about the Creator's morality, not physical properties.

> > I've started to look in detail at one modest approximation to such a grander universe
> > on the following thread:
> >
> > Designer of Our Universe by the Back Door?
> > https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/QflrDHqlDD0
> > > Former is
> > > just saying less than latter with more words.
> >
> > On the contrary, the former encompasses a much wider range of possibilities than
> > the "God of the gaps". And it gets even broader when one considers such events
> > as the production of the first prokaryotes, and the first eukaryotes reproducing via meiosis,
> > and the Cambrian explosion. Each can be hypothesized as due to intelligent, technologically advanced
> > motiles naturally evolved on an exoplanet -- just as YOU believe we evolved from prebiotic
> > chemical compounds on earth.

> I trust that there is/was actual manifesto with goal:
> "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that
> nature and human beings are created by God"
> Do you deny it?

It is from an internal memo that was leaked to reporters about three decades ago by someone
whose identity is not publicly known. Back then, some creationists and
ID people envisioned such a goal, but it has become clear that the goals
must be more modest. Mine certainly are, and have been from the beginning,
since I no longer have the "theistic understanding" that I had until the age of 21.

> So the former sentence just carefully avoids saying out what was
> actually meant. Rest of "ranges of possibilities" are mentioned as obfuscation.

Not by me, I can guarantee that. One reason others don't mention them at this early
stage of ID theory is that the focus is on showing how design is a viable
alternative to the very underdeveloped ideas about macroevolution and mega-evolution.
[The latter term is due to George Gaylord Simpson.] Current evolutionary theory
is mostly about microevolution, and exclusively where "The Modern Synthesis" is concerned.


I was going to tell you today about one alternative theory of ID developed by Behe,
but I've decided it is better to finish the installments to this December 3 post of yours first.
I do aim to finish both projects before the end of this week.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of So. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Again I pick up where I left off in my last reply.

On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
> On Wednesday, 3 May 2023 at 04:55:09 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:

> > > The evolutionnews/discotute still do never publish any positive clams about
> > > how, when and why anything happened.
> >
> > So what? I told Burkhard the following in the same post that I recalled for the lazy Daggett:
> >
> > "We have no idea how, when, and by what route the original human inhabitants of Madagascar got there; nor of how big the first wave was,
> > nor whether there was a second wave, etc. The one thing we are sure of is that they came
> > from Southeast Asia, probably Malaysia/Indonesia. All else is folklore with no written records."
> >
> > Nor, I might add, any artifacts that could be dated to the first century after the coming of
> > the first arrivals -- whenever it was. Yet we know such things had to have existed.

< snip of text to which you did not respond this time around>

> But that does not fit as analogy. There are hypothetical concrete events, concrete place,
> concrete doers, concrete reasons, concrete time estimates. However dim, inaccurate and
> doubtful. But concrete.

I've done all that with my directed panspermists. They introduced prokaryotes some 3.5 gigayears ago
with long range instrumental probes; they never actually had to come close to the planets
they seeded. Their home planet was probably no further than 1000 parsecs away,
in the same spiral arm of our galaxy or the closest neighboring arm.

They are hypothesized to have ordinary intelligence not very much higher and
not appreciably lower than ours. But their technology was a couple of centuries more advanced
than ours when they began their program, which lasted over 10,000 years and involved
at least that many planets being seeded, perhaps ten times as many.

It envisions several quite different possibilities, ranging from A to Y [1]:

(A) the panspermists had the same genetic code and same protein enzymes we do,
as did most living things around them, all having evolved naturally on the home planet.
The ID was modest, being the kind of genetic engineering we do. [2]

(Y) the panspermists invented whole new life forms using protein enzymes instead of ribozymes
which their own bodies used. One life form was the prokaryotes they sent to earth and thousands
of other planets.

[1] Z is not developed and I leave it up to Mark Isaak and others like him to say more about it:

(Z) the panspermists were "life as we do not know it and cannot scientifically guess the properties of,"
and they invented "life as we know it" and sent its prokaryotes here.

[2] This seems to be what Crick had in mind when he wrote:

The senders could well have developed wholly new strains of
microorganisms, specially designed to cope with prebiotic
conditions, though whether it would have been better to try to
combine all the desirable properties within one single type
of organism or to send many different organisms is not
completely clear.
--Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, _Life Itself_
Simon and Schuster, 1981, p. 137

I named several other possibilities in an earlier reply to you on this same thread,
and I will go into the same kinds of details as I did here if you are curious.

> > Minnich did research the Irreducible Complexity (IC) of one kind of bacterial flagellum.
> > This is something that Judge Jones shoved down the memory hole of his wretched essay
> > that he composed as a prelude to his Dover ruling, and which Ron O believes to be gospel truth.
> >
> Minnich did analyse what some proteins do and how lack of those damages the species.

That's very vague. What he did was to show that EACH AND EVERY one of ca.30 parts
of the flagellum is essential to the highly important ability to swim. Remove one, the
bacterium cannot swim; put it back genetically, it swims.

An individual of that species which is able to swim is far more "fit" [as in "survival of the fittest"]
than one that cannot swim.

> Minnich did not analyse if, when and why these proteins were allegedly designed.

What he did do was show the flagellum [NOT the individual proteins] was Irreducibly Complex
[IC] and put the burden of proof on opponents of ID to show that the whole
~30 part organelle could have evolved without being a fantastic stroke of luck like a "hopeful monster."

Do you feel up to finding out whether anyone has tried to shoulder a hefty
part of that burden?

> Even not how many times superficially similar but different flagella were "designed" in nature.

One that did not evolve by many individual steps, yet was as complicated as the one Minnich
studied would be revolutionary.

> It was totally ordinary microbiology what Minnich did.

So what? The discovery of penicillin was even more ordinary.
So was the mutation that produced the sickle cell trait that gave
immunity to malaria in a part of Africa where malaria was rampant.

> And it did not show that those
> can not evolve,

As long as no scenario is found for evolution that is not maladaptive at some stage,
there is a mystery whose seriousness the majority of anti-ID zealots are blind to.

Scientists do not like to admit to the general public how little they know.
The Smithsonian magazine did an article about bats that admitted
we have no fossils for intermediates like we have for whales but
did not hint at the difficulty of finding a plausible route that
intermediates MIGHT have taken.

We talked about this mystery last year, and I hope we can resume
talking about it before the end of this month.

Got to say good night now. Duty calls.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS I'm glad you have returned to the thread where Marc and JTEM
treated you so abominably, and showed how foolish they were.
I have stood up for you there and will continue to do so.

[Mark Isaak]

On 5/10/23 7:56 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Again I pick up where I left off in my last reply.
>
> On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:

> [...]

>> But that does not fit as analogy. There are hypothetical concrete events, concrete place,
>> concrete doers, concrete reasons, concrete time estimates. However dim, inaccurate and
>> doubtful. But concrete.
>
> I've done all that with my directed panspermists. They introduced prokaryotes some 3.5 gigayears ago
> with long range instrumental probes; they never actually had to come close to the planets
> they seeded. Their home planet was probably no further than 1000 parsecs away,
> in the same spiral arm of our galaxy or the closest neighboring arm.
>
> They are hypothesized to have ordinary intelligence not very much higher and
> not appreciably lower than ours. But their technology was a couple of centuries more advanced
> than ours when they began their program, which lasted over 10,000 years and involved
> at least that many planets being seeded, perhaps ten times as many.

Have you ever calculated the energy cost for seeding one planet? Sure,
there are lots of unknowns, but an order-of-magnitude estimate should be
possible.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, May 11, 2023 at 8:45:18 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 5/10/23 7:56 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Again I pick up where I left off in my last reply.
> >
> > On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
> > [...]
> >> But that does not fit as analogy. There are hypothetical concrete events, concrete place,
> >> concrete doers, concrete reasons, concrete time estimates. However dim, inaccurate and
> >> doubtful. But concrete.
> >
> > I've done all that with my directed panspermists. They introduced prokaryotes some 3.5 gigayears ago
> > with long range instrumental probes; they never actually had to come close to the planets
> > they seeded. Their home planet was probably no further than 1000 parsecs away,
> > in the same spiral arm of our galaxy or the closest neighboring arm.

> > They are hypothesized to have ordinary intelligence not very much higher and
> > not appreciably lower than ours. But their technology was a couple of centuries more advanced
> > than ours when they began their program, which lasted over 10,000 years and involved
> > at least that many planets being seeded, perhaps ten times as many.

All the above is part of the hypothesis, of course, and subject to change if it can be improved.

> Have you ever calculated the energy cost for seeding one planet? Sure,
> there are lots of unknowns, but an order-of-magnitude estimate should be
> possible.

I did something like that for each individual mission to one planet about
a decade ago. I'll have to review what I did there, and multiply it
by the number of missions prior to the actual seeding. Those earlier
missions would have been thorough enough to make one seeding adequate.
[True, not every seeding would "take" but the majority would.]

Alas, Hemidactylus (with the help of others) so thoroughly meddled with my last attempt
to post a thorough FAQ on DP, that I've never tried to talk about DP in depth again.
But enough has changed since then that I will brave another effort
before the end of 2023.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS If your main concern is the high cost, I did address it
a decade ago and can dig up what I wrote if you are interested.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Their arguments are in the mainstream of biology, and I have been talking
about them in those terms all along.

> >>> The California condor came close to this point a half century or so ago.


> >>> Their article is very technical, but this much is easy to see on a first skimming.
> >>> The first possibility is what a literal reading of the blurb, and of Genesis 2 (NOT Genesis 1!) gives.

> >>> The second is very different, and is the one I think most likely if indeed there was such a "bottleneck".
> >>>
> >>> How about you?
> >
> > You ducked the question. Don't you realize how difficult it is to argue for the first possibility?

> It's difficult to argue for either,

At first I thought you were ducking the question again; but then
I read further down, and saw that you found it very easy to "argue" [read: blatantly allege]
that the first possibility is impossible without invoking supernatural creation.

Did you actually THINK about what you wrote in EITHER place?

> and the data Gauger used would not
> distinguish them.

After your amazing (yet poorly supported) about-face below, this has
become a purely academic afterthought.

> >> Genetically speaking, the two cases are identical.
> >
> > That's a pseudoscientific sentence. Here's a scientific one:
> >
> > "If we confine ourselves to genetics, the two cases are indistinguishable."
> >
> > Note, "indistinguishable," not "identical." You wouldn't say,
> > "Speaking of naked-eye optics, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B are identical."

> I don't think the two sentences are at all comparable, but since we
> agree on the intended meaning I see no reason to belabor this.

I do: you are contradicting the intended meaning below.

> > The two possibilities are easily distinguishable, given the right fossils.
> > In fact, fossils have been used for something like a century and a half
> > to discredit the first possibility. [See also the Quote of the Day at the end, from even earlier.]


> You will note that I have also pointed to genetic data that
> distinguishes the scenarios, just not data used by Gauger.

You've contradicted the intended meaning of your earlier sentence,

"Genetically speaking, the two cases are identical."

>Let's face it, a comparison of any part of the human and chimp genomes kills off
> the first option,

You weren't facing it above, quite the contrary; and now that you are claiming
the opposite, you aren't facing the biology that you learned in graduate school or before.

These genomes have undergone separate evolution for millions
of years; that has nothing to do with the alleged impossibility
of a mutation occurring millions of years ago in two hominini whose descendants
only interbred with each other successfully.

Are you alert enough to grasp the significance of the word "successfully"?

>which is all about fiat creation of Adam and Eve.

I'd love to see whether you can intelligently argue for this.

> > >But a careful reading
> >> of the paper will show that Gauger is most interested in the case of a
> >> population of two with no precursors.

I glossed over "with no precursors" on a first reading.
I saw no hint of that anywhere in the article.
It paints you into a corner which you might not be able to wiggle out of below.

<snip for focus>

> > I'd like to see the reasoning (or wishful thinking) behind what you say about "a careful reading,"
> > and why you credit Gauger with the alleged "most interest."

> I'd like you to try reading what the article says.

You are being completely unresponsive here, and I'm calling your bluff.
Tell me on which page and column you read signs of sympathy with creationism.

> > Wishful thinking is obviously behind the "created" in your next sentence:

> Have you read the article?

Have you? let's see whether you fold on my calling your bluff.

> >> This is an attempt to legitimize
> >> the scientific plausibility of an original, created pair.
> >
> > You are mind-reading one of the co-authors in a most crass way.
> > Even if one or both of them were most interested in the the first alternative,
> > a more likely motivation is that they had already co-authored at least two
> > earlier papers on the same general subject.
> >
> > You evidently missed references 20 and 21 in your "careful reading" of the paper.


> There's a common motivation for all those.

The irony of you alleging a motivation here spans a dozen years of interaction with you.


Next, you bring baseless, trumped-up charges against me, and probably against
the authors -- both of them.

> Why are you so anxious to
> ignore the authors' creationism. I direct your attention to references
> 17-19.

If you have become so simple-minded that you think referencing creationist works makes one a creationist,
you may need to contemplate quitting talk.origins before you embarrass yourself further.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

Some of their arguments may be mainstream, but others are clearly
intended to appeal to YECs. Now Gauger is almost certainly not a YEC
herself and may in some cases just be tossing red meat to her perceived
audience. Biocomplexity isn't a real journal, after all. But if we
accept the article as sincere, the authors are clearly creationists,
though likely old-earth, progressive creationists rather than YECs. They
are clearly entertaining, if they do not quite present as favored, the
hypothesis of separate creation of an original human pair. This is by no
means mainstream science.

>>>>> The California condor came close to this point a half century or so ago.
>
>
>>>>> Their article is very technical, but this much is easy to see on a first skimming.
>>>>> The first possibility is what a literal reading of the blurb, and of Genesis 2 (NOT Genesis 1!) gives.
>
>>>>> The second is very different, and is the one I think most likely if indeed there was such a "bottleneck".
>>>>>
>>>>> How about you?
>>>
>>> You ducked the question. Don't you realize how difficult it is to argue for the first possibility?
>
>> It's difficult to argue for either,
>
> At first I thought you were ducking the question again; but then
> I read further down, and saw that you found it very easy to "argue" [read: blatantly allege]
> that the first possibility is impossible without invoking supernatural creation.
>
> Did you actually THINK about what you wrote in EITHER place?

I'm assuming that was a rhetorical question.

>> and the data Gauger used would not
>> distinguish them.
>
> After your amazing (yet poorly supported) about-face below, this has
> become a purely academic afterthought.

There is no about-face.

>>>> Genetically speaking, the two cases are identical.
>>>
>>> That's a pseudoscientific sentence. Here's a scientific one:
>>>
>>> "If we confine ourselves to genetics, the two cases are indistinguishable."
>>>
>>> Note, "indistinguishable," not "identical." You wouldn't say,
>>> "Speaking of naked-eye optics, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B are identical."
>
>> I don't think the two sentences are at all comparable, but since we
>> agree on the intended meaning I see no reason to belabor this.
>
> I do: you are contradicting the intended meaning below.

Since the intended meaning was mine, I don't see how you can know better
than I. And I say there is no contradiction, just clarification.

>>> The two possibilities are easily distinguishable, given the right fossils.
>>> In fact, fossils have been used for something like a century and a half
>>> to discredit the first possibility. [See also the Quote of the Day at the end, from even earlier.]
>
>> You will note that I have also pointed to genetic data that
>> distinguishes the scenarios, just not data used by Gauger.
>
> You've contradicted the intended meaning of your earlier sentence,
>
> "Genetically speaking, the two cases are identical."

Again, you appear not to know the intended meaning, which is that the
two cases can't be distinguished using the data that the paper
mentioned. This in fact may be the reason they avoided use of outgroups
by using the folded data.

>> Let's face it, a comparison of any part of the human and chimp genomes kills off
>> the first option,
>
> You weren't facing it above, quite the contrary; and now that you are claiming
> the opposite, you aren't facing the biology that you learned in graduate school or before.

Again: you are misreading what I said.

> These genomes have undergone separate evolution for millions
> of years; that has nothing to do with the alleged impossibility
> of a mutation occurring millions of years ago in two hominini whose descendants
> only interbred with each other successfully.

That's quite a vague scenario, but you seem to be talking about instant
reproductive isolation due to two parallel mutations that happened in
one male and one female simultaneously, who then mated with each other.
If that isn't what you're proposing, I apologize. But that scenario is
wack, and it's not in any way what the paper's scenario is.

> Are you alert enough to grasp the significance of the word "successfully"?

Shouldn't that have a "nudge nudge, wink wink" in there somewhere?

>> which is all about fiat creation of Adam and Eve.
>
> I'd love to see whether you can intelligently argue for this.

Already have, but further detail will follow.

>>>> But a careful reading
>>>> of the paper will show that Gauger is most interested in the case of a
>>>> population of two with no precursors.
>
> I glossed over "with no precursors" on a first reading.
> I saw no hint of that anywhere in the article.
> It paints you into a corner which you might not be able to wiggle out of below.

You appear to have glossed over a lot in that paper too. Read more
carefully next time. More below.

>>> I'd like to see the reasoning (or wishful thinking) behind what you say about "a careful reading,"
>>> and why you credit Gauger with the alleged "most interest."
>
>> I'd like you to try reading what the article says.
>
> You are being completely unresponsive here, and I'm calling your bluff.
> Tell me on which page and column you read signs of sympathy with creationism.

Pages, columns. Keep reading.

>>> Wishful thinking is obviously behind the "created" in your next sentence:
>
>> Have you read the article?
>
> Have you? let's see whether you fold on my calling your bluff.
>
>
>>>> This is an attempt to legitimize
>>>> the scientific plausibility of an original, created pair.
>>>
>>> You are mind-reading one of the co-authors in a most crass way.
>>> Even if one or both of them were most interested in the the first alternative,
>>> a more likely motivation is that they had already co-authored at least two
>>> earlier papers on the same general subject.
>>>
>>> You evidently missed references 20 and 21 in your "careful reading" of the paper.
>
>
>> There's a common motivation for all those.
>
> The irony of you alleging a motivation here spans a dozen years of interaction with you.
>
>
> Next, you bring baseless, trumped-up charges against me, and probably against
> the authors -- both of them.
>
>> Why are you so anxious to
>> ignore the authors' creationism. I direct your attention to references
>> 17-19.
>
> If you have become so simple-minded that you think referencing creationist works makes one a creationist,
> you may need to contemplate quitting talk.origins before you embarrass yourself further.

You will note that the creationist works in question are used as support
for one of the two hypotheses. I submit that no real scientist would
cite creationist literature (and biblical YEC literature at that) in
support of anything other than what creationists say, and what
creationists say is only very rarely relevant to any science. And it's
necessarily in support of a separate creation scenario. That's what
"primordial couple" means, and note that it's contrasted with a
"bottneleck from a previously evolving large population". If you read
for comprehension, that means that the primordial couple are not
previously evolving or descended from a large population. That's on the
first page. But there's much more.

The study finds a single couple (bottleneck or creation) possible as
recently as 500ka, but the authors are anxious to push that much more
recently so as to fit creation. Even in the abstract, " With only minor
modifications of our parsimonious model assumptions, we suggest that a
single-couple origin 100kya, or more recently, is possible." Oddly
enough, it actually isn't possible. More red meat.

The single couple origin (SCO) is explicitly and consistently contrasted
with a bottleneck. (Your version of apparent instant speciation is a
bottleneck.)

Page 4: "There is also the further possibility that the original pair
were instantiated with only helpful or neutral variation, and no harmful
recessive mutations, and thus might not see any inbreeding depression
even if the population started small."

What does "instantiated" mean here? Is that unclear?

Page 4: "If a model with a first couple is true, when seen through the
lens of evolutionary theory, any such primordial variation would be
misinterpreted as being due to ancient mutations."

Note: the variation in a "first couple" is not due to prior mutations.
It's new; no ancestors. This is driven home on the next page in Figure
5, which shows the original 4 alleles at each locus presenting the
illusion of ancestors that never existed. "If the model with a founding
generation is correct, the chromosome segments of the founding
generation have no further ancestry, and then the shaded lines above
them represent non-existing ghost lineages." This is not a founding
generation as in "founder effect"; those alleles would have ancestors.
This is de novo creation of genomes.

I could go on at length, but it seems OK to stop there. If you demand
further evidence, it's abundant in the rest of the paper. Maybe you
could find some of it yourself. I know you desperately want your ID
heroes not to be religiously motivated creationists, but I'm afraid that
most of them are, and in friendly territory, as Biocomplexity is, they
are often explicit about it. As here. You need to accept that.

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 5 May 2023 13:17:13 -0700 (PDT), Lawyer Daggett
<j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 2:05:12?PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

>> > On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10?PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> > [...]

>> >>> On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08?AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

There are many candidates for Adam and Eve as a couple from whom we
are all descended. Mitochondrial Eve's parents are one such couple.
Her grandparents are another two such couples, her great-grandparents
4 such couples and so on. The same logic applies to Y-Chromosomal
Adam.

It beats me why Peter feels this need to link mitochondrial Eve and
Y-Chromosomal Adam. Or why Ann Gauger feels the need to tie humans
into a single couple *with no precursors*. I'm not aware of any
mainstream Christian denomination that insists upon that, the Catholic
Church certainly doesn't. John Harshman has opined else-thread that
she is OEC rather than YEC but either way, she seems to be driven by
the need to justify a literal reading of Genesis, ribs and serpents
included presumably.

[Lawyer Daggett]

With respect, you're not helping.
There are multiple concepts at play here.
I won't expand on mtEve and Y-Adam as I hope it's not necessary.
They are distinct from a separate concept.

That separate concept is if there is a pair of individuals which are
common to the ancestry of all living humans, moreover, a most
recent such pair. Many such pairs will exist in our past as a matter
of near mathematical necessity. Among them will of course
exist a most recent pair with some ambiguity on how one defines
"most recent".

Such a pair are unlikely to include mtEve or Y-Adam.

There is a third concept and that is of a bottleneck couple from
which represent sole ancestors. This means that all of your
diverging branches of ancestors --- each and every divergent
line --- funnels back through that pair. This means that none of
your ancestors have ancestors that don't exclusively trace back
to that couple. This is close to the biblical Adam and Eve
concept of simplistic Sunday School.

The distinction available is that it doesn't mean this Evish and
Adamish couple couldn't have had similar ancestors, or had
brothers and sisters and remote cousins. Instead it means that
all such brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts have left no
direct ancestors. This is the bottleneck Adam and Eve.

The distinction is between having a couple __among__ all
living people's ancestors, and having all living peoples ancestors
exclusively funnel through a unique couple.

The significance of the distinction is that for the latter, there
is a bottleneck of genes to be inherited from that specific
couple's genes.

It is worth noting that for such a couple in our distant ancestry,
mtEve and Y-Adam would almost certainly not be them but
somewhere in their remote offspring.

That's just how the math works.

How far back such a bottleneck would be is a somewhat complex
question. There are ways to model it with assumptions of randomness
of mating and neutral selection. These aren't especially good
assumptions.

Then there's data from certain genes that show significant allelic
diversity. For the case of a bottleneck Adam and Eve, a gene can
have at most 4 ancestral alleles.
Call it Gene X, Adam has XA1, XA2. Eve has XA3, XA4.
Their offspring would be limited to those 4 alleles or newly arisen
variants.

Now consider the implications of human genes that have more
than 4 distinct alleles that have homologues among other Great Apes.

My point, though it took long to get to it, is that invoking
mtEve and Y-Adam into the discussion of bottleneck Adamish
and Evish sews confusion into something many already
don't have a solid conceptual grasp of. Please be cautious
about doing so.

[jillery]

The above illustrates a misunderstanding of what is meant by
Y-chromosome Adam and mitochondrial Eve. They refer to the most
recent common ancestor of the type. So it's inaccurate to say that
Adam's and Eve's ancestors are candidate couples, as they are not the
most recent, by definition.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve>

>It beats me why Peter feels this need to link mitochondrial Eve and
>Y-Chromosomal Adam. Or why Ann Gauger feels the need to tie humans
>into a single couple *with no precursors*. I'm not aware of any
>mainstream Christian denomination that insists upon that, the Catholic
>Church certainly doesn't. John Harshman has opined else-thread that
>she is OEC rather than YEC but either way, she seems to be driven by
>the need to justify a literal reading of Genesis, ribs and serpents
>included presumably.

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

[Martin Harran]

On Tue, 16 May 2023 14:31:48 -0700 (PDT), Lawyer Daggett
<j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:

You are correct that invoking mtEve and Y-Adam into the discussion of
bottleneck Adamish and Evish sows confusion but it was Peter, not me,
who did so. I was simply illustrating how pointless that is as there
are many examples of couples from whom we are all descended -
ancestors of mtEve and Y-Adam are just examples and there is no
particular need to just focus on them.

I'm not sure what "most recent" has to do with it. As you point out,
simple mathematics (the irony burns regarding a particular poster)
guarantees that we will have many common ancestors both *before and
after* mtEve and Y-Adam. People sometimes do the maths working
backwards without considering the even greater exponential growth
working forwards. I have been working on my family tree for a while. I
have 16 great-great grandparents but all of them have over 300
descendants that I have identified so far. That rate of expansion is
possibly a bit higher than average - Irish Catholics tended to have
large families in times gone by - but I'm not sure that it's
particularly exceptional.

You are correct about "simplistic Sunday School" concepts - that is
what I was referring to when I said "driven by the need to justify a

literal reading of Genesis, ribs and serpents included presumably."

People who try to use scientific argument to endorse a simplistic
reading of Genesis invariably end up tying themselves in knots. It
comes across to me as their faith being built on very poor
foundations.

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 17 May 2023 08:15:53 +0100, Martin Harran
<martin...@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

> I have been working on my family tree for a while. I
>have 16 great-great grandparents but all of them have over 300
>descendants that I have identified so far.

Before the pedants and deliberately-confused jump on board, I do not
mean that there are over 4800 descendants between them. There are, of
course, 8 different lines descended from those 2xgreat-grandparents
each with their own popuklation but each line does end up with over
300 descendants and there is increasing overlap between the individual
populations as you move down the generations. I would estimate the
total number of descendants from the 16 as something over 400.

[...]

[Öö Tiib]

Note that family tree has not much to do with mtEve and Y-Adam.
Family tree is kind of sweet lie about pyramid scheme how the might of
family did "spread and grow".
The mtEve and Y-Adam are confusing scientific notations. Most recent
common matrilineal grandparent of all currently living humans is mtEve.
Most recent common patrilineal grandparent of all currently living men
is Y-Adam. And that is basically it.
Our sexual selection has so strong pressure towards male
differentiation and variety that it is possible that Y-Adam isn't even
classifiable as h.sapiens.sapiens. Towards females we have had more
"average" requirements so the mtEve likely was h.sapiens.sapiens, from
long time later. Both had tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of
contemporary humans and so it is possible that all other genetic
material from those two has gone extinct.

[DB Cates]

Another aspect of the mtEve/YAdam concept is that they change over time.
Several thousand years ago they were ancestors of today's and in several
thousand years they will be descendants of today's.

[John Harshman]

Peter, it seems odd that you, who are interested in the science and all,
never replied to this.

[Glenn]

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 6:35:08 AM UTC-7, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
> > > https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/
> > >
> > > Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
> > > about an ID scam that never existed.
> > The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
> > and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
> > sign of comprehending the first thing about.
> >
> > You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
> > had written such things as:
> >
> > ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
> > …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
> > =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

> A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
> things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.
> In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.

Personally I very much doubt that Ann intended to admit that ID is not science.
"All the way down" and "originate" indicates, at least in part, the subject of abiogenesis.
You likely want to believe that there is "science" to the atheistic field of abiogenesis,
and that admitting, as have so many so often here argued that there is science and evidence to scientifically support a naturalistic origin and evolution of life on earth, is not a dogmatic commitment and not an admission that biology is not science.
It is hilarious to hear people like you wave your magic science wand around.
>
> It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief
> system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
> just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

Yes, and many more of them are evolutionists than IDers. Everyone has biases and religious beliefs that should be separate from science, but it is quite obvious that those like you are the ones that only give occasional lip service to when it looks to serve
your purpose of criticizing others. Ann claims to be Catholic, and alothough all ID proponents are Catholic, her religious belief does not invalidate ID science - any more than your atheistic beliefs invalidate biology.

[Lawyer Daggett]

You do have a way of torturing things. Is abiogenesis any more "atheistic"
than plate tectonics? Or thermodynamics? What about enzyme kinetics?
How about ecology? Is ecology an atheistic science in your mind?
What one wonders do you intend to communicate by labeling the study
of abiogenesis to be an atheistic field? I'm inclined to think you are
trying to insinuate that investigations into abiogenesis are somehow
predicated on an assertion that there are no gods.

> > It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief
> > system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
> > just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

> Yes, and many more of them are evolutionists than IDers. Everyone has
> biases and religious beliefs that should be separate from science,
> but it is quite obvious that those like you are the ones that only give
> occasional lip service to when it looks to serve your purpose of
> criticizing others. Ann claims to be Catholic, and alothough all
> ID proponents are Catholic, her religious belief does not invalidate
> ID science - any more than your atheistic beliefs invalidate biology.

There is no predicate belief to biology that involves an affirmative
belief in the existence of god(s) (theism), or the lack of such a
belief (atheism), or an affirmative belief in the non-existence of
any god(s) (antitheism).

Further, your assertion that all ID proponents are Catholic is almost
certainly false. It's hard to find truth in your claims. You just aren't
very good at this when you bother to express extended thoughts.
You're full of insinuations about some vague reference to me
giving lip service about something to something but there's no
tether to anything I've said that coherently fits.

Gauger expressed a dogmatic view of all things originating in God.
Despite your confusion, science does not have any parallel dogma
about nothing possibly arising from god(s), even if it is methodologically
precluded from invoking such causation. Still, what you fail to
grasp, apparently, is that science does not assert that it must be
able to find, and will find, a satisfactory solution.

[Glenn]

I'll stop you right there, since I have better things to do that hear your crap over and over again. Abiogenesis is defined and commonly understood as life from natural causes, but unlike plate tectonics, no one has any idea of how or when life first began or how it began.
So unequivocally yes, abiogenesis is atheistic, and plate tectonics itself is not.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Abiogenesis could be at least deistic in the universal wind up toy version
if not theistic in that theistic evolutionists might abide by it as they,
unlike certain others, can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Plate tectonics implies though that the world was never perfect to begin
with and isn’t explicitly referenced in Genesis. Was Adam fashioned from
clay from Rodinia or Pangaea? If Israel or the US were chosen by God, why
did he have to wait so long after the Earth was formed to adopt them?

[John Harshman]

On 5/18/23 4:28 PM, John Harshman wrote:

Did you somehow miss the two replies? Are you avoiding this subthread
for a reason? Should I speculate?

[Martin Harran]

On Mon, 22 May 2023 10:36:33 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

[...]

all ID proponents are Catholic

Cite please.

[...]