Zira_C

tgamble quoting Behe responding to MillerI think Behe is the king of slippery use of the English language. What claims exactly would be falsified? You can’t falsify a claim (or more strictly a hypothesis) without testing it. And testing a hypothesis (like ID) does not amount to having a separate theory (like natural selection) not provide sufficient explanation to the severe skeptic.

Consider this scenario.
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I could hold the world-view that we are all part of the matrix (yes like the movie the matrix), and everything we perceive is not real, it’s a dream. Some of this dream comes from our unconscious, and some of it is a result of direct electrical inputs into our brains making us think we are going through a normal life. The direct inputs are all programmed by computers (artificial intelligence). Joy, pain, and life’s challenges can all be (and in many cases are) built into the input signals. If they weren’t we would perceive the inconsistencies between the dream and the reality, and wake out of it (just like the movie). My evidence that an as-yet-unknown and or unknowable intelligence exists, and is inputting information directly into our brains is the bacterial flagella. The bacterial flagella is simply too complex to exist outside of a dream. There is no way the flagella could arise naturally, without intelligent intervention, and since we humans cannot create a bacterium with flagella ourselves, it could not be part of the dream created by our unconscious. The only explanation is there is some intelligence exceeding ours, which has programmed the flagella into our dreams. The only explanation is the loud piercing cry of design. Intelligent design that is.

In order to falsify my claims, Ken miller must “just take an appropriate bacterial species, knock out the genes for its flagellum, place the bacterium under selective pressure (for mobility, say), and experimentally produce a flagellum—or any equally complex system—in the laboratory? (A flagellum, after all, has only 30-40 genes, not the hundreds Miller claims would be easy for natural selection to rapidly redesign.) If he did that, my claims would be utterly falsified.”
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Behe is the king of wordy slickness (or is it slicky wordiness). A hypothesis is not falsified until it is tested, and it is certainly not falsified by testing (or even falsifying) a separate hypothesis. Behe needs to test his own hypothesis instead of hoping Miller will do it for him. So far nothing. I doubt that there will ever be a test for ID. The current articulation of ID is inclusive of the concept of God working through miracles. How do you put God into a test tube? Why would you want to?

RBH

RufusAtticus wrote In their explanation of why they didn't see ever-increasing complexity, they say However, the first possibility that they consider implementing for getting past the 'complexity barrier' is "Very large populations and lots of CPU power ...".

They're also looking at the possibility of their entities re-using components. In other words, they're now ready to actually simulate some of the variables biology deems relevant. Their 'environment' was an infinite plane, a pretty uninteresting environment.

That they ran into a 'complexity barrier' isn't surprising if one has done any serious work with GAs and AL (or with biological systems, for that matter). They are no doubt very good computer scientists, but I sure wish they had talked to a biologist or two before expending all those gazilions of CPU cycles.

RBH

pz

Several years ago, I went to a computer science seminar in which a researcher was talking about her efforts to simulate viral evolution. She spent the first third of her talk basically telling us how accurate and detailed her work was, how reliant she was on lessons learned from biology, and how her model was also going to help us learn new things about biology.

Then she plunged into the details. First thing she mentioned was how they encoded X & Y chromosomes in their artificial viruses.

It was all downhill from there.

RBH

pz wrote Kinda puts me in mind of those engineers who are ID proponents. It's not the engineering background; it's the ignorance.

RBH

tgamble

I'm no biologists but viruses don't have x and y chromosomes do they?

btw, when you say something like that. please let the rest of us know the reason. in this case I can guess the reason but in other cases it's a bit more complex. Thanks.

pz

Sorry, but yes, you've got it right. Viruses don't have sexes, although they can engage in a little recombination if infecting the same host cell.

It was basically a completely bogus invention that revealed that if she had talked to any biologists, she sure hadn't paid any attention to them.

Principia

The largest viral genome (CMV?) is on the order of several hundred Kbps. The human X and Y chromosomes are 160 and 30 Mbps respectively. That discrepancy should have rung a few bells...