Doubting Didymus

Just to cut down on your workload on the speciation readings, Keith, I'll quote here what I think is a particularly good example of allopatric speciation. (That's where a population of a species is isolated, its genetics changes a little over time, and then it can no longer interbreed with the original population. This is the most commonly referred to form of speciation.)

Principia

Sorry Keith, I am not as generous as some of the others as I am not willing to grant anything of which we have no evidence yet. Do we need living things in order to evolve? Interesting question. And it depends highly on what one means by "living." Rest assured, however, there are researchers that are actively pursuing this topic. For instance, consider Sidney Fox's protocells. Are they alive? Or consider the RNA world hypothesis. Is RNA alive? Maybe. Maybe not. But for the purposes of this discussion, I don't think it is relevant. In my opinion, what is relevant is how you, Keith, would go about answering this question. Let's turn the tables and put you in the role of a scientist. Do we need living things to evolve? How would you test this question? Would you use a computer model (in silico evolutionary experiments, like AVIDA)?
Would you research how the universal genetic code evolved? If you can access a library, here's a good article that summarizes one approach to this topic: The point here is that there are many venues for research. The question in my minds is whether you, Keith, are intellectually curious enough to pick up on one of the topics and figure out how it might have happened.
Your logic is flawed. If you think it is "miraculous," that does not mean that it is in fact miraculous. One only has to look back in history to realize how many "miraculous" events we have since explained with careful scientific analysis -- the weather, the stars, the rising and setting of the sun, babies, you name it. Once again, how would you, Keith, demonstrate to us in an objective fashion why TOE is miraculous? I have not yet seen an argument from you that even begins to promote this claim. Good question. How would you go about researching it? Why ask why when you don't know how? Good question. How would you research this question? Perhaps you would start looking elsewhere in the Universe?

Doubting Didymus

Only for the purposes of debate! I'm not actually conceding anything.

Oolon Colluphid

<Jumps up and down with hand in the air>
And I did! And I did it first!

But Keith ignored it. Well, maybe if three of us say the same thing it might get through. It took a while with the 'evolution is not random' idea.

Keith, for what is now the fourth time: by your own argument, unless you claim to know god's intentions, you cannot comment on whether something is good design. So you must drop the design argument.

But if you are allowed to call something 'good design', then you need to explain the designs that are blatantly poor. So you need to offer an explanation for blind eyes in pitch-dark-living creatures. There's a host of other examples, but that's an interesting one to start with.

TTFN, DT

LordSnooty

You're right, Keith. Maybe God wants us to be badly designed... FOR A REASON!

Maybe our appendix - an organ previously thought entirely useless in modern man - serves some amazing purpose in God's astonishing secret plan.

Paul

Oolon Colluphid

Yeah, its purpose is to be a pocket to trap bacteria in!

Creationists have an answer to the appendix. It is part of the immune system, they claim. And it’s true. It contains lymphoid tissue, and so assists the immune system.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/357.asp

However... (there was bound to be a ‘but’ with a creationist claim, wasn’t there ) ... however, this misses two crucial points.

Firstly, the appendix is far from a critical organ (if organ it be). There’s loads more lymphoid tissue in the body. What’s more, the Peyer’s patches (aggregated lymphatic follicles) in the appendix wall are found all through the bowel, not merely in the appendix as AiG would lead you to believe. (See here.)

And secondly, and even more tellingly, there is nothing in the appendix’s shape, its form, that is related to this function. It does not need to be a worm-like pocket. The same amount of lymphoid tissue could be found by just lengthening the bowel a little.

Sure, membrane foldings are a standard way to increase surface area -- but that’s hardly a problem for the bowel, because the whole damned thing is lined with villi (fingerlike projections for increased surface area). Having just the one big one doesn’t help much, you need to do it lots. If surface area is what counts, one would expect smaller and more. Nope, the appendix is a deep, thin pocket.

Saying that it has an immune function does not explain its shape. That explanation, in Nicholas Humphrey’s phrase, has ‘too much design of the wrong kind’. It is rejected by an ‘argument from inappropriate design’. Even if the appendix were designed, it is still a poor design for this function. Because its shape allows bacteria to too easily become trapped by a blockage. The bacteria then invade the appendix wall, leading to life-threatening rupture. This is no side-issue, it is a very common problem: something like 7% of people will suffer from this.

An intelligent (let alone an omniscient) designer should have foreseen this problem, and changed its shape accordingly -- wider and shallower, perhaps, or simply lengthened the gut. But no, it’s a worm... and that makes no functional sense.

The AiG ‘rebuttal’ comes in answer to the claim that the appendix is vestigial. But as I have said loads of times before, vestigial does not have to mean -- hell, it simply does not mean -- useless. Creationists scamper around trying to find uses for vestigial structures... and thereby miss the point entirely. It doesn’t matter whether a claimed vestigiality has any remaining function or not. What matters is that for no reason they can explain the thing is structurally just as evolution predicts it should be if it used to be a more substantial item.

Same with the coccyx. Who cares if the coccyx has muscle attachments? It still is shaped exactly like a greatly reduced tail should be shaped. The muscle attachments do not explain why it starts as separate bones that fuse. Why not just make a single bone in the first place, if that’s all it’s for? Again, the explanation has too much design of the wrong kind.

Who cares if the appendix has some small role in the immune system? It does not have to be shaped so dangerously to do that job.

Cheers, DT

Keith

The point is, you can know that certain things have some sort of design and purpose, but the fact that you don't know why something was designed in a certain way is not proof that it was poorly designed. You're just making another unsupported claim.

Keith

Doubting Didymus

So you can tell living things were definitely designed, but you can not say anything about whether it's good design or bad design?

If that is the case, then you can NOT automatically attribute the design to god, as you can not tell if the design is too 'good' to have come from elsewhere. The raelians believe that living things were genetically engineered by extraterrestrials. How can you place your god-design hypothesis over theirs if you can not say anything about how good the design is?

Principia

False. Whether or not something is poorly designed can be an objective claim stemming from an objective criteria. I take a car and compare it to a bike. I decide on a measure -- maximum sustainable velocity. And I conclude that a car is a faster vehicle than a bike, regardless of what I may perceive the purpose of the vehicle to be. The point here is that you don't know what the purpose is and therefore you cannot claim optimality. So unless you know your God's purpose in the design, there is every reason to entertain any objective criteria for judging design. So, by all means, you have our permission to drop this line of reasoning.

Keith

I don't understand this. I haven't claimed to know which particular parts of a human eye, for example, are/aren't as well designed as they could have been. Nothing about my argument depends on my having the ability to accurately and dependably know which design features are/aren't optimal. What I am saying is that it is obvious that certain things we observe in nature are purposefully designed by an intelligent being.

Keith