S2Focus

Well... it looks like another irony-meter is toast!

Doubting Didymus

Seeing as vanderzyden has already proved in his posting here his comprehensive understanding of molecular genetics, perhaps he can here give us a succinct summary of what points of Deannes he thinks are poor.

pz

I was bad. Very bad.

In response to Mike Gene, who wrote, "Okay, we can all thus agree that someone can be knowledgeable, intelligent, sane, and honest, yet also have real doubts that the immune system did in fact evolve by natural selection", I replied,

"Almost -- pick three."

Dr.GH

"Almost -- pick three."

Well done. Very well done.

Jesus Tap-Dancin' Christ

I was thinking the other day, and something occured to me regarding ID:

Don't the No Free Lunch theorems do more to disprove ID than evolution? I mean, since averaged over the mean, search algorythms perform no better than random chance, doesn't that shoot a hole the size of the Titanic in ID's hull? Afterall, the mechanism by which evolution works is random chance--this is what produces the mutations, which are the results, which are then compared to the desired result, fitness. An optimized search pattern would be used by an "intelligent desinger" but if they perform no better than chance, then there can be no intelligent designer, since anyone capable of computing such algorythms would be capable of figuring out the NFL theroems, said designer would not bother. Unless of course, he was an idiot savant, but that precludes the intelligence.

Did I make sense there?

Writer@Large

*whew!*

I was okay up until "yersinia"'s second post ... and then my brain just started swimming. I'll need to tackle that thread when I'm at home ... with coffee ... and Tylenol.

--W@L

pangloss

Hi Vander.

Still wondering if you plan to provide those refs you said you would, or if I should chalk up that as just another example of creationist hyperbole/disinformation/rhetorical bombast.

Thanks.

Xixax

at pz:

lol

Valentine Pontifex

Well you make at least as much sense as the DI people do. :-)

Of course the fallacy in using NFL against ID is, I am sure, the same as the fallacy in using NFL against evolutionary biology. One needs to show that the assumptions of the NFL theorum apply to the problem.

Still, it is a very interesting suggestion. I wonder if anyone can do anything with it?

Valentine Pontifex

That got deleted? Unless the rules of that forum require that all posts be substantial posts than the moderator was clearly out of line. Of course it might have been better just to say:

"No we can't."