Oolon Colluphid

Oh Dawkins, not that old pile of doggy-do again! Charles, that whistling sound was my point flying right on past you.

I am quite confident that neither you nor anyone else has ever built a living cell, much less a bat. So arguments about echolocation, or whatever else, being really well designed ring hollow. I doubt you've done (or even could do) a full-blown, accurate and comprehensive design analysis to come to your conclusions.
What?

Can anyone tell me what it is about the creationist mind that prevents it learning basic bulletin board code for quoting?
Not entirely it ain�t, and �survival of the fittest� is an extremely rough-and-ready description of natural selection.
Yep. But you�re missing out the fact that it therefore can only operate in the here-and-now. It doesn�t matter if a �better� design is in principle possible; the stepwise changes to get to it are constrained by the history of the organism. Basically, there�s no �getting worse for a while in order to eventually get better� allowed, because the temporarily-worse organisms, by definition, will not be as successful at surviving and reproducing.

Thus we can have the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals. It branches from the vagus in the neck, and ennervates the larynx, which is also in the neck. The route that uses least materials, then -- the route that evolution would like to choose for it, since it requires fewest resources to build -- is straight across the neck. But it doesn�t do that. Instead, it runs down the neck into the chest, loops underneath the aorta by the heart, then travels right back up again. Even in giraffes, where an �extra� fifteen feet or so of nerve are required.

The reason, from evolution, is quite simple. It does indeed start as a straight-ish line, but gets �pulled� down into the chest as the developing heart moves that way too, because it starts out by passing under the relevant (I�ll look up which, if you want) pharyngeal arch. In our fishy ancestors, it went a direct route to what ended up as a larynx, and as the lineage evolved, it was simpler -- that is, not a matter of �getting worse for a while� -- to grow a little more nerve, than to re-route the thing. A smaller phenotypic mutation, and hence a less �risky� option. This is historical constraint.
And thus the hypothesis is completely unverifiable, completely irrefutable. It doesn�t matter how ludicrous a feature is -- the plain dangerous shape of the appendix, the way Pleuronectiform fish twist their skulls during development instead of being flattened in the obvious, shark and ray way, the way golden moles have eyes with no retina and a feeble optic nerve and which are completely covered by furry skin -- no matter how pointless, god must have had his reasons, so put up with it.
Apart, of course, from the 99.9% of them that haven�t
How do you know they are designs? By what criteria do you identify them as such?

Was the appendix designed to trap bacteria?

Were third molars designed to overcrowd the human jaw?

Was the inguinal ring designed to allow hernias?

Just how well do the wings of flightless beetles work, given that they�re often completely fused in under the elytra?
Okay, refute the claim that he�s just fucking with our heads.
:banghead: Where does survival and reproduction come into my analysis? I guess you are just not paying attention.

I would only be begging the question -- assuming what I set out to prove -- if I assumed evolution. I am not. I am assuming an intelligent designer of the kind� you seem keen on, plus some simple ideas about what constitutes good design, also of the kind used to demonstrate the designer�s hand in things.

I am not using evolution to refute design. I am leaving the answer open. It is perfectly possible, from my analysis, that the designer was whimsical, often drunk, sadistic or prone to bouts of madness, or that there were several designers. The one thing that does not fit is a vastly intelligent designer that cannot make mistakes.

And of course, a watertight irrefutable hypothesis isn�t begging the question...
It�s quite simple, really. One uses {quote} at the start of a quote, and close it with {/quote}, but using [ and ] instead of the {} ones.
Huh? Evolution is irrelevant for this analysis.
Fuck me sideways! What is it, am I using words that are too long? Are my sentences too complex?

The only approval the designs need to meet is the one that shows others to be good designs. It does not relate to survival and reproduction. It relates to far more basic ideas: not using more materials than necessary to do the job, not being wasteful, not being more convoluted than it has to be. Why is that difficult to grasp?

There�s a chap called Terry Hill. He�s a manufacturing researcher and consultant. He�s written a book called Manufacturing Strategy. In it, he says that any third-rate engineer can design complexity, and that the hallmark of truly intelligent design is not complexity, but rather simplicity. Specifically, it is the ability to take a complex process or product spec and create the least complicated design that will meet all project parameters.

Does that sound unreasonable? If that principle can be used to spot good design, then it can spot poor design. Survival and reproduction are only secondarily relevant.

However... Would you say that the purpose of bat echolocation is... what? Aiding the bat in praising the Lord? Getting a good Scrabble score? Making a pretty noise for dogs to hear?

If you think that echolocation is relevant for its survival, then you (too) are making a religious claim, apparently.
I don�t know about universal, but it is a common sense truth that wasteful, excessively complicated and pointless designs are not good ones.
:banghead: It is not �my� rule. It is the rules that identify good design.

If a bird�s wing is good at what it�s for, then a bat�s lung is not very good at what it is for.

Reject the criteria which identify poor design, and you reject the criteria which identify wings and echolocation as good designs.

How do you know that echolocation is designed?

TTFN, Oolon

Dr Rick

It was done for you on this page

Urvogel Reverie

The fauna of the Burgess Shale, if anything, damage the classic creationist argument regarding the Cambrian "explosion," just as they do attempts to present the early Cambrian as a massive punctuational event.

Urvogel Reverie

Charles Darwin

Kollar, E. J., and Fisher, C., 1980, Tooth induction on chick epithelium: expression of quiescent genes for enamel synthesis: Science, v. 207, p. 993-995.


This is not exactly what I had in mind, which was something like, for example, the reversal of crippling mutations to induce teeth in birds. The grafting of embryonic mouse tissue with embryonic mouse tissue is a very different experiment.

The Science article title suggests a long-dormant set of genes has been awakened by the mouse tissue. They must conclude that the genes somehow escaped crippling mutations throughout all these eons, and now spring into action when called.

In fact, the mouse tissue, which is competent to form teeth, do so when grafted to the bird tissue. What is interesting is that the "Form jaw" signal from the bird is sufficiently homologous to the corresponding mouse signal, that it successfully indicates to the pluripotent mouse tissue that its assignment is to form the jaw.

The evidence for evolution here is not in the formation of teeth, but rather in the signal homology (not exactly strong evidence). Interesting research, but not strong evidence for evolution.

Prince Vegita

Without even looking at the article I'm going to guess that these mouse/chick chimera experiments were set up to demonstrate the fact that the signal homology (due to evolution) is what leads to formation of these structures. Why is this not strong evidence, exactly? Repeating assertions do not for a good argument make.

Charles Darwin

The chimera was presented here as strong evidence by virtue of a bird growing teeth. That is, that there exist in birds a set of teeth genes that have long since become dormant due to evolution. I agreed that such a finding would be strong evidence in favor of evolution.

But evidential interpretation, from the evolution perspective, is that signals are homologous. This is not, in my view, such a strong evidence as finding dormant teeth genes in birds. Also, the homology argument has several other problems. More later on that.

Charles Darwin

And you say I'm the one confusing terms? How can a probability be astronomical? A probability ranges from 0 to 1. On the other hand, there are a great many "design" options possible as the genome of a species undergoes random biological variation. The vast majority of these "options" lead to useless garbage.

That's right. I characterized the biological variation as random and you objected. Here's the exchange:

So now you say:

But of course I never said evolution is random. So now who's making up the strawmen? My point still stands, the biological variation that evolution depends on is random, yet the universe of design options is astronomical. To change a fish into a giraffe you are going to need a whole lot of biological variation in a whole bunch of small steps. And in each one of those small steps, non of the biological variation was created due to selective pressure. You have conveniently missed my point and gone off on a tangent about how selective pressure makes evolution a non random process. So what? No one said otherwise.

"The Evolution of Improved Fitness By Random Mutation Plus Selection" reads as follows:

Translation: Since I haven't a leg to stand on, I'll start off with condescension.

Translation: Now I will proceed with a totally inappropriate example, falsely ascribing the powers of natural selection within the immune system to evolution.

This is an example of the sort of junk science that evolution leads to. The design space is tiny; a tremendous quantity of experiments are conducted at a very fast rate; there are no intermediates and each experiment tests out a complete design (i.e., the antibody-antigen binding affinity); and fixation is a given. To say that the immune system demonstrates the feasibility of evolution is ludicrous. Antibody evolution is a misleading argument for evolution.

Charles Darwin

I didn't realize it was easy to explain how the eye evolved. OK, well let's start with the catalytic cascade, where hundreds of thousand of GMP's are hydrolyzed and hundreds of sodium channel close increasing the cell membrane voltage drop by an mV, all due to a single photon.

lpetrich

Reading "Charles Darwin"'s comments is depressing. He has no understanding of his namesake's great idea, and he prefers to stumble and fumble rather than seriously try to grasp it.

The original CD's mechanism of natural selection is a combination of random variation and NONRANDOM selection, and it's easy to write a computer simulation of that process.

To change a fish into a giraffe you are going to need a whole lot of biological variation in a whole bunch of small steps. And in each one of those small steps, non of the biological variation was created due to selective pressure.

Variation occurs all the time as a result of mutations; selection is simply a result of trying to stay alive; the original CD had recognized that simply trying to stay alive acts just like a selective breeder of domestic animals and cultivated plants.

It's certainly true that it's a long way from a fish to a giraffe; however, going from a fish to a giraffe does NOT happen by one big jump, but instead, by a large number of steps. And from the fossil record, we know what many of the steps look like.

lpetrich

How is that fundamentally different from other cellular signaling pathways?