Again, Irreducible Complexity is literally a falacy known as argument from incredulity, and is considered pseudoscience at best, relying implicitly on ignorance of how something formed to make the claim in the first place, following it up with another fallacy known as false dichotomy to claim that design is thenceforth the only argument. Additionally, the base claim of it has long since been refuted, as was noted in Kitzmiller v. Dover, where the judge noted, and I quote: "Professor Behe conceded that the proposed test could not approximate real world conditions and even if it could, Professor Minnich admitted that it would merely be a test of evolution, not design. (22:107-10 (Behe); 2:15 (Miller); 38:82 (Minnich)). We therefore find that Professor Behe?s claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large. (17:45-46 (Padian); 3:99 (Miller)). Additionally, even if irreducible complexity had not been rejected, it still does not support ID as it is merely a test for evolution, not design. (2:15, 2:35-40 (Miller); 28:63-66 (Fuller))." (Page 79 of Judge E. Jones III's write up regarding his ruling). And again, the links I provided priorly address the failings of Irreducible Complexity rather well.darkstarangel said:
Unfortunately, the lack of citation makes it hard to evaluate the claim, which could have any number of explanations including atavism. Additionally, there's also the possibility that you either misinterpreted or misremembered the conclusion that we have to take into account. I've only done a quick search on the matter, but I am getting some hits, the most prominent of which focused on 'activating' and 'deactivating' a 'Master control gene' for the eye based on whether or not another gene was present, making the results comparable to any given trait that needs to be homozygous to be expressed (such as Haemophilia). Amusingly though, the so-called "Eyeless" gene (aka PAX6) seems to be more famous for producing additional eyes (such as on the wings and legs) than it is for getting rid of them.darkstarangel said:
CCR5-Ä32: base pair mutation of the CCR5 protein. Deletes a segment of the gene, which directly affects the function of T-Cells. Said mutation grants resistance to smallpox and (most amazingly) certain strains of HIV. 5-14% of people of European descent have this mutation, lending to the conclusion that it was first expressed there and was selected for during an epidemic of smallpox or during the Black Death.darkstarangel said:
More important though, you're still falling into that age-old creationist mental trap where you're suggesting that something has to either happen 'now or never'. Change can be gradual, building up off of prior traits, eventually building up to something greater. How to put it...Let's say you have a brick. Not much you can do with it, right? On its own it is fairly useless. Though you could use it as a hammer or a throwing weapon, I suppose, so it does have some function. Now let's say you got another brick. And another and another...suddenly you can make a wall. It's not a great wall, but you can block a cave with it and thus protect yourself from the elements and wild animals. The key point that I'm trying to get at here is that accumulation allows for more dramatic expression than any single change on its own.
...How does that address what I said there about you making a claim that by nature contradicted itself? Let me run that by you again: Your claim boiled down to "a beneficial mutation wouldn't necessarily be beneficial". By definition if something is beneficial its positive effects outweigh any negatives it may introduce, granting an overall advantage. If the negatives outweigh the positives, then it is not a beneficial trait to start with. Think of it as an equation, where solving the equation shows an organism's overall fitness. You start off with 5 in three equations. In the first equation we add 4 and subtract 3. (5 + (4-3) = 6) In this case the net effect is +1, and this represents our beneficial mutation. In the second equation we add 3 and subtract 6. (5 + (3-6) = 2). Our net effect here is -3, and that represents our detrimental mutation. Our third equation adds 2 and subtracts 2. (5 + (2-2) = 5) Here the net effect is 0, and is thus an example of a benign mutation. Of course, this is a very simplified explanation, but the gist is that you seemed to be under the impression that any negative negated the possibility of a trait being considered positive, which is far from the truth, and I hope I illustrated with the equations demonstrating the concept of net gain and net loss.
Mmm, not really. Make no mistake, sudden environmental change can wipe out species, but specialization hardly results in a dead end, namely because there is no obligation to continue a given trend and in fact it is quite possible to go in the opposite direction entirely. Case in point: By all indications whales and dolphins are descended from now-extinct land animals, which themselves were descended from aquatic animals. Or let's use Darwin's finches as an example. Environment changes in a way that favors small beaks: The population reflects this with beaks becoming smaller over the course of generations, simply due to the smaller-beaked finches having a survival advantage that lets them survive long enough to reproduce. Now let's change the environment to one where larger seeds (requiring larger, stronger beaks to eat) become prevalent and smaller seeds become scarce. Those birds with the largest beaks, capable of eating even some of those larger seeds suddenly have a survival advantage that their small-beaked counterparts lack (especially considering that they have less competition for those larger seeds than the small-beaks have for the small seeds), and thus over time the population reflects that, with beaks growing larger over generations. We've seen the effects of environmental change in action.darkstarangel said:
Eh, it's not a rumor so much as it is precidence. In my experience at least it's fairly common to see a creationist actively reject the idea. Though granted, those creationists who do so tend also to be the ones who present the dessert banana as 'proof' against it due to how well suited it is for human consumption (the greatest irony of that being that the dessert banana's evolutionary history is fairly well documented, and is a crowning example of the strength of selection pressures, in this case supplied by humans through horticulture). Glad to see you aren't one of those thoughdarkstarangel said:
You assume that those traits needed to develop simultaneously, or that the organs you refer to couldn't be the result of a fusion of multiple existing traits. Take the eye, for instance. It's a collection of photoreceptors that still have function in any number of shapes and concentration. There's no reason that life would have to go immediately from 'no-eye' to 'human eye'. We would have trouble with say only a patch of photoreceptors, but a variety of creatures do in fact make use of just that.darkstarangel said:
That's what selection pressure does. The mutations themselves are unguided. Natural Selection, however, determines which get passed on. Mutation provides the variation, Natural Selection provides the guiding principle, culling unfavorable traits.darkstarangel said:
Well at its core, hindsight bias is basically the preconception that 'since things turned out this way that's the only way they could have turned out'. I say you used a form of it due to your claim of randomness and your insistence of natural selection being unable to direct that randomness seemed to heavily imply a "the fact that the world exists as it does now disproves both" train of thought. Could just be because I see that argument a lot though.darkstarangel said:
[/quote]Now you're just being unreasonable and making use of a fallacy known as argument from ignorance ("This statement is true because it cannot be 100% proven false"...though to your credit you aren't taking it to the "I'm right" extreme). Were I to draw a comparison to the argument, I think I'd have to go with the dismissal of a doctor saying that his patient's tests indicated he didn't have cancer, on the grounds that the doctor obviously didn't test every single cell in the patient's body for it.[/quote]
That much is true. What makes your bit unreasonable, however is that you're explicitly asking for scientists to prove a negative for you, to examine every single individual to completely rule out a possibility before you accept a given explanation even provisionally. Again, that's like telling a doctor to go back and test for cancer again because he didn't check every cell in your body.darkstarangel said:
You're right, disagreement doesn't mean the other person is ignorant, and I never claimed that it does. What I said is that ignorance tends to be the root cause of the overwhelming majority of objections to evolution. This includes irreducible complexity, which actively relies on ignorance to make its claims, which boil down to "We don't have an explanation yet, so assume a designer because there's no other explanation", with the only supporting arguments being personal incredulity. All that said, I do have to grant that you're easily several cuts above most creationists I've argued against.darkstarangel said:
Ok, let's try a different approach and go back to basics. The base code quote blocks in most forums tends to be [quote ] immediately before any text you want to quote and [ /quote] immediately after it (minus the spaces in the brackets, of course). To identify who the quote belonged to, you expand the opening code to include ="username" before the end bracket. Linking to the exact post number though...that requires a bit of code that I've yet to figure out the method behind, other than that the quote button shows it :/darkstarangel said:
