Let me first thank you again for taking the pains and effort to give your time and input here. Never think that it isn't appreciated.
Also, I wanted to let you know that I'm only responding here to the points you've made that aren't covered in the "out of order..." thread of comments. I just don't want to get spread too thin or repetitive.
Specific claims of ID (which are actually just negative arguments against evolution) have been falsified. The central tenet of ID (that life has been designed by an intelligent agent) is unfalsifiable.
Maybe some claims have been falsified, but the bulk of them are still in play and defended well. Many neo-Darwinian claims have been falsified, but many are defended well from within its paradigm.
You have admitted several times that positive evidence has been offered.
The tautology of natural selection as the process that gave us the vast array of life is unfalsifiable.
That's a pretty broad item, but it can surely be falsified. If natural selection is shown to not cause the small changes in organisms over time that we can observe, then it's falsified. If the envisioned micro/macro-evolutionary boundary (whatever that is) is shown to exist, that would do it. If spontaneous generation of complex organisms is observed...
I think we all agree that natural selection is a process capable of change within a kind, so your criteria still has neo-Darwinism's claim as unfalsifiable. The claim is that natural selection is capable of producing the vast array of life we find on earth. Please stay true to the points in contest.
You have admitted on this site already that the proposed process of macro-evolution works too slowly to be observed, thus is neither provable or disprovable.
For your last point, the best we can do is the Cambrian explosion in the fossil record, which is sudden appearance followed by stasis. Yet, it somehow proves neo-Darwinian claims?
Easy, just show evidence of a guiding force that influences the mechanisms of evolution.
After stating:
The central tenet of ID (that life has been designed by an intelligent agent) is unfalsifiable.
What was your word? "Rich."
Yet this could be easily falsified by finding, say, a bird older than the first fish, or a mammal older than amphibians. Sure, the record is incomplete, but what we do have matches up quite well.
Archaeopterix is a proposed reptile-bird transition that follows birds in the fossil record. There are cother instances of the fossil record being out of order, and they are explained away by appealing to rock movement, tectonics, etc... Since fossil order hasn't yet been effective as proof or refutation, I won't hold my breath for it to start.
Um... You may want to reread even within the neo-Darwinian circles as to how well the record matches up. It actually matches worse now than it did for Darwin. Come to think of it, it was right here on this site that you all but admitted this and gave me explanations about why it doesn't.
An understanding of the development of the clotting system reveals that your silmultaneous requirement isn't required at all. That happens when you start with a current complex system and try to work backward (as Behe does). If you start from the beginning, you see that the primitive clotting system would have developed in an animal with low blood pressure and minimal blood flow. The clotting triggers would be much less sensitive than what we have, and therefore the clotting ability wouldn't be strong enough to endanger the animal, but would still confer an advantage.
...
Now, this is another place where your answer convinces me that you haven't actually read Behe on Behe, because he stands pretty hard on all of this argumentation.
You started with a twin-engine to explain the evolution of a space shuttle. Blood pressure etc aside, you still have a complex system that would have to have evolved into place. It would have to have evolved dependent structures in the system such as clotting and thinning simultaneously without killing the organism. And per natural selection, it would have needed to be simultaneous to be a selective superior "fittest", otherwise it was expending energy that others weren't just to produce useless and probably dangerous partial system. You almost seemed to realize this when you said:
"As the clotting triggers got stronger, then selective pressure for a clot-dissolving system would increase."
But then you drew short again. Even with low blood pressure, thinned blood is a detriment, and at the very least not a selective improvement, else the clotter wouldn't have been a selective improvement. Clotted blood without the unclotter is definitely not an improvement, even with low blood pressure.
This is only a couple of the problems with the offered response that Behe dissects, and I would genuinely recommend that you revisit Behe's responses to his critic. (And I haven't even brought up that we can't assume that the "primitive" system evolved into the modern. Even Dawkins states that we can't do that. and he proposes that the eye and other complex systems probably had to evolve several times over in different ways and through different channels.)
Your use of the word "acceptable" is confusing here. The responses he ignores are "acceptable" to the just about everyone in the scientific community. Behe's version of "acceptable" is unreasonable. Scientists have provided *possible* pathways for the evolution of his IC systems, based on genetic data, chemical similarities, etc. He will accept nothing less than the ACTUAL pathway, it seems.
I beg to differ. If the responses ignore the actual points he makes, then they are not refutations. They are appeal to authority. Scientists have offered potential pathways that fail to get around Behe's assertions, just as you did. You (and they) still have not provided a way to turn the biplane into a space shuttle one bolt at a time while remaining in flight and outperforming all of the other biplanes.
And yet you are fond of citing the "worldview" leanings of scientists to explain their views?
Actually, that fair enough. I'll take that criticism. But also note that I am claiming equal ground between neo-Darwinism and ID for qualification as science. I'm not sure you can fault me for a "good for the goose" argument.
Wow, that's quite the laundry list of Creationist claims you've got there. I like the use of "many", "much", "a lot" to describe isolated cases that the scientific community, itself, discovered and corrected as part of the normal processes that brought us our current understanding.
Piltdown man, Nebraska man (complete with full iullustration based pig bones) Haekel's embyology, Archaeoraptor Liaoningensis, peppered moths, to name but a few... And your defense that the scientific community found and exposed them is a little unsatisfying with the knowledge that most of them are still printed in textbooks to prove evolution.
So a gut feeling that something is "apparent" is stronger evidence to you than the mountains of diverse data accumulated to date? If so, then we may never be able to reconcile our definitions of science.
And now you break out the Darwinian words like "mountains of evidence". That's mountains of evidence interpreted within a paradigm that you have admitted here doesn't need to be questioned. The majority of the evidence is supportive of small change within a kind, as you've admitted yourself to macroevolution is basically unobservable due to time involved. All of the evidence can be interpreted within the competing paradigms. You leave out the evidence that calls it into question, and reinterpret it with "just-so" stories as to why it doesn't (see the fossil record and cambrian explosion as one example). And most of the argument against ID that you seem to use boils down to an appeal to authority.
I'm not surprised that we;re not...
Yo...
Let me first thank you again for taking the pains and effort to give your time and input here. Never think that it isn't appreciated.
Also, I wanted to let you know that I'm only responding here to the points you've made that aren't covered in the "out of order..." thread of comments. I just don't want to get spread too thin or repetitive.
Specific claims of ID (which are actually just negative arguments against evolution) have been falsified. The central tenet of ID (that life has been designed by an intelligent agent) is unfalsifiable.
Maybe some claims have been falsified, but the bulk of them are still in play and defended well. Many neo-Darwinian claims have been falsified, but many are defended well from within its paradigm.
You have admitted several times that positive evidence has been offered.
The tautology of natural selection as the process that gave us the vast array of life is unfalsifiable.
That's a pretty broad item, but it can surely be falsified. If natural selection is shown to not cause the small changes in organisms over time that we can observe, then it's falsified. If the envisioned micro/macro-evolutionary boundary (whatever that is) is shown to exist, that would do it. If spontaneous generation of complex organisms is observed...
I think we all agree that natural selection is a process capable of change within a kind, so your criteria still has neo-Darwinism's claim as unfalsifiable. The claim is that natural selection is capable of producing the vast array of life we find on earth. Please stay true to the points in contest.
You have admitted on this site already that the proposed process of macro-evolution works too slowly to be observed, thus is neither provable or disprovable.
For your last point, the best we can do is the Cambrian explosion in the fossil record, which is sudden appearance followed by stasis. Yet, it somehow proves neo-Darwinian claims?
Easy, just show evidence of a guiding force that influences the mechanisms of evolution.
After stating:
The central tenet of ID (that life has been designed by an intelligent agent) is unfalsifiable.
What was your word? "Rich."
Yet this could be easily falsified by finding, say, a bird older than the first fish, or a mammal older than amphibians. Sure, the record is incomplete, but what we do have matches up quite well.
Archaeopterix is a proposed reptile-bird transition that follows birds in the fossil record. There are cother instances of the fossil record being out of order, and they are explained away by appealing to rock movement, tectonics, etc... Since fossil order hasn't yet been effective as proof or refutation, I won't hold my breath for it to start.
Um... You may want to reread even within the neo-Darwinian circles as to how well the record matches up. It actually matches worse now than it did for Darwin. Come to think of it, it was right here on this site that you all but admitted this and gave me explanations about why it doesn't.
An understanding of the development of the clotting system reveals that your silmultaneous requirement isn't required at all. That happens when you start with a current complex system and try to work backward (as Behe does). If you start from the beginning, you see that the primitive clotting system would have developed in an animal with low blood pressure and minimal blood flow. The clotting triggers would be much less sensitive than what we have, and therefore the clotting ability wouldn't be strong enough to endanger the animal, but would still confer an advantage.
...
Now, this is another place where your answer convinces me that you haven't actually read Behe on Behe, because he stands pretty hard on all of this argumentation.
You started with a twin-engine to explain the evolution of a space shuttle. Blood pressure etc aside, you still have a complex system that would have to have evolved into place. It would have to have evolved dependent structures in the system such as clotting and thinning simultaneously without killing the organism. And per natural selection, it would have needed to be simultaneous to be a selective superior "fittest", otherwise it was expending energy that others weren't just to produce useless and probably dangerous partial system. You almost seemed to realize this when you said:
"As the clotting triggers got stronger, then selective pressure for a clot-dissolving system would increase."
But then you drew short again. Even with low blood pressure, thinned blood is a detriment, and at the very least not a selective improvement, else the clotter wouldn't have been a selective improvement. Clotted blood without the unclotter is definitely not an improvement, even with low blood pressure.
This is only a couple of the problems with the offered response that Behe dissects, and I would genuinely recommend that you revisit Behe's responses to his critic. (And I haven't even brought up that we can't assume that the "primitive" system evolved into the modern. Even Dawkins states that we can't do that. and he proposes that the eye and other complex systems probably had to evolve several times over in different ways and through different channels.)
Your use of the word "acceptable" is confusing here. The responses he ignores are "acceptable" to the just about everyone in the scientific community. Behe's version of "acceptable" is unreasonable. Scientists have provided *possible* pathways for the evolution of his IC systems, based on genetic data, chemical similarities, etc. He will accept nothing less than the ACTUAL pathway, it seems.
I beg to differ. If the responses ignore the actual points he makes, then they are not refutations. They are appeal to authority. Scientists have offered potential pathways that fail to get around Behe's assertions, just as you did. You (and they) still have not provided a way to turn the biplane into a space shuttle one bolt at a time while remaining in flight and outperforming all of the other biplanes.
And yet you are fond of citing the "worldview" leanings of scientists to explain their views?
Actually, that fair enough. I'll take that criticism. But also note that I am claiming equal ground between neo-Darwinism and ID for qualification as science. I'm not sure you can fault me for a "good for the goose" argument.
Wow, that's quite the laundry list of Creationist claims you've got there. I like the use of "many", "much", "a lot" to describe isolated cases that the scientific community, itself, discovered and corrected as part of the normal processes that brought us our current understanding.
Piltdown man, Nebraska man (complete with full iullustration based pig bones) Haekel's embyology, Archaeoraptor Liaoningensis, peppered moths, to name but a few... And your defense that the scientific community found and exposed them is a little unsatisfying with the knowledge that most of them are still printed in textbooks to prove evolution.
So a gut feeling that something is "apparent" is stronger evidence to you than the mountains of diverse data accumulated to date? If so, then we may never be able to reconcile our definitions of science.
And now you break out the Darwinian words like "mountains of evidence". That's mountains of evidence interpreted within a paradigm that you have admitted here doesn't need to be questioned. The majority of the evidence is supportive of small change within a kind, as you've admitted yourself to macroevolution is basically unobservable due to time involved. All of the evidence can be interpreted within the competing paradigms. You leave out the evidence that calls it into question, and reinterpret it with "just-so" stories as to why it doesn't (see the fossil record and cambrian explosion as one example). And most of the argument against ID that you seem to use boils down to an appeal to authority.
I guess we aren't getting far at all...