Hopeful Monsters

Nice one Martin B :thumbs:

Thanks to others for contributions so far.

IMHO 'same designer, common design' fails to explain what a hand/forepaw-like bone structure is doing inside the cetacean pectoral fin.

Even superficial analysis shows that this bone structure CANNOT be the result of careful, superior, creative engineering, given how the cetacean flipper functions.

DMB

I believe a creationist was arguing in a thread about the appendix a day or two ago for sufficient design. As I understand this, you can have a designer who is not supercompetent but produces things that work well enough. That is pretty much what natural selection does, after all.

Of course, the "designer" doesn't then look much like an omni-everything god, but ID proponents pretend that a possible designer doesn't have to be a particular god.

The designer appears more in the guise of the mad inventor, like the Christopher Lloyd character in the Back to the Future films. He just picks up a basic bone kit that is lying around in his workshop and stretches it to get bat wings, and so forth.

I think the objection to this sort of designer would be Ockham's razor: he doesn't add anything to the natural selection explanation, which is more economical, and we would still have problems explaining the designer.

Hopeful Monsters

Noted DMB - I too had seen the 'sufficient' argument, but it surely cannot wash for Christianity's 'God' or Islam's 'Allah', unless this 'God' is deciding only to do a 'good enough' job for some reason, and not express 'His' full creative scope and brilliance and capability ... for some reason.

Maybe all gods are solely the product of human fantasy, fetish and obsessive brain-looped daydreams - and therefore a product themselves of evolution - and it is explained thus.

Martin B

I disagree that it fails to explain that. Rather, it is the complete uselessness of such an explanation that makes it a failure as a hypothesis, not as an explanation. It leads to no predictions that can be falsified.
That's because two different forms of idiocy are at work here. One is that there was a designer, the other is that it was a highly skilled designer at work. The common designer argument has not been logically falsified while there is now doubt about how "good" a designer he was.

In any event, we agree that the alternative is bullshit. :thumbs:

My approach to this problem is subtlely different, that's all. The reason is that I'm trying to devise a more powerful illustration for non-scientists. Consider a lurker faced with the images we have presented. A creationist will use that tired old "same creator, similar design" crap. A non-scientist may now concede that this doesn't prove one theory or the other. A victory for a creationist.

However, if we point out that creationism can conceivably explain any pattern we throw at it, while evolution could not, it becomes much more evident what the value of this information we present is. It is not that creationism can't explain nested homology, it's that evolution couldn't explain the alternative. I admit it's a subtle point, but from a philosphical perspective, I think it is more accurate.

Creationists "win" debates by simply offering alternative explanations for patterns which we have cited as evidence for evolution. This is much the same as psychics blaming "negative energy" when they fail to perform under controlled situations. We need to explain why the patterns make evidence for evolution. Not only would this demonstrate evolution's great explanatory power, but also the fact that our inferences are conceivably falsifiable: other patterns simply cannot be supported by evolution.

As for the whale series: I'm glad you liked it, EscapeVelocity. I like to put up that picture of Pakicetus because Kent Hovind likes to claim that we only have a peice of its jaw. Hovind lies again.

Cheers,
Martin

By the way, how do you get those images to embed so nicely into the message? I had to use imageshack, but I'd like to make nicer presentations like you guys did!

RBH

You can post links directly to the images if you wish. That doesn't raise a copyright problem as long as they're not hosted on IIDB. In fact, it's be nice to have the source for your modified version.

RBH

Hopeful Monsters

I agree with your points - but they are indeed subtle.

We need to improve at establishing that creationism and ID lack both predictive scope and falsifiability (creationism 'explains' anything and everything and therefore nothing) and at the same time show that descent with modification from common ancestry and nested homology are things which evolution explains (and predicts) but this at all times leaves it open to factual evidence which it is unable to explain and which can establish it as false.

There's hypothesised examples of this isn't there? I just cannot recall them now. Because of common ancestry you can say-

"you never find a mammal with a ..."

"you never find a reptile with a ..."

"you never find a bird with ..."

"you never find a fish with ..."

The examples have escaped me.

RBH

Martin wroteActually, presented right I don't think it's that subtle: A good scientific theory tells us both what happened and what could not have happened. That is, it explains the phenomena we see, and tells us why the phenomena aren't some other way. Good theories rule out as much as they rule in.

Since ID creationism rules nothing out, it fails as a theory. In being able to accommodate any observation at all, it explains nothing.

RBH

Martin B

I made it with photoshop. I found the Orca on the web, the fossil ones are modified from the original papers.

Cheers

Hopeful Monsters

Whale evolution―



:

And― Evolution predicts that...

And― Evolutions also predicts...

Worldtraveller

Escapevelocity, in that picture above, with the 4 different forelimbs, it looks like the whale one has an excessive number of phalanges. Is that right, or is it 'artistic license' and not really a good illustration?

Cheers,
Lane