From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat Nov 13 2004 - 18:24:54 GMT
Mark,
> On 12 Nov 2004 at 18:28, Scott Roberts wrote:
> > msh says:
> > Scientific conclusiveness? Of course not. There's nothing
> > conclusive about the existence of quarks. Does this mean quantum
> > mechanics shouldn't be taught in a physics class?
>
> [Scott:] Bad choice of word on my part, perhaps, but I don't know a
> better one offhand. No, nothing is conclusive, but some things are
> more evident than others. In quantum mechanics, anyone with the money
> can do the requisite experiments and get the same results. That's not
> true with the theory that chance and natural selection are sufficient
> to show how lizards turned into birds, etc.
>
> msh says:
> See below...
>
> > msh said:
> > The question is, which of the two hypotheses is scientifically
> > viable? We see scientific evidence of the workings of chance
> > mutations and natural selection every day.
>
> [Scott:] We have never seen them create new species.
>
> msh says:
> See below...
>
> > There is so MUCH evidence for chance and natural selection as the
> > mechanism of evolution that it is difficult to understand why
> anyone
> > would deny it. But maybe that's where one's "philosophical [or
> > religious] disposition" comes in.
>
> [Scott:] Where is it? What laboratory recorded the development of a
> new species whose mechanisms were solely chance and natural
> selection? How could one even tell that only chance is involved?
>
> msh says:
> See below...
>
> > msh says:
> > Well, maybe. But his most devastating argument remains in tact,
> > regardless. Setting aside the fact that our observations of the
> > evolution of life reveals a messy process that is not all that
> > orderly, is what we humans "perceive" to be order in the universe
> > sufficient to prove the existence of a universal designer? When
> > someone rolls five dice and they come up sixes, is this evidence
> > that the dice are loaded?
>
> [Scott:] If it happens a million times in a row, yes.
>
> msh says:
> Ah, but species latch-up DOESN'T occur a million times in a row, not
> even once in a thousand thousand million failures.
But species latches did occur a million times, defying entropy over and
over.
What we see in
> the neo-natal ward are the failures, because in our little life-spans
> the odds are that we won't catch even one mutation leading toward a
> successful new species. And even if we happened to stumble upon a
> successful mutation, who's to say we'd even recognize it for what it
> is? We'd see a freak with webbed fingers and really feathery thick
> hair on his arms and write him off as just that, a freak, not the
> first step toward a species of flying hominids.
>
> No, I'm afraid the ID folks fail to grasp the expanse of cosmological
> time and the mind-numbing complexity of matter, trying to contain
> both within their little probability calculations.
They (or at least one that I read) give the cutoff for implausibility at
one in ten to the 150th power, precisely to take the expanse of
cosmological time into consideration.
>
> > msh said:
> > As for the so-called probability calculations upon which ID hangs
> > its hat, they seem to me to ignore important scientific background
> > information, resulting in much lower probability estimates than
> are
> > fairly warranted. But I'll go into this more in a later post,
> where
> > I'll take a look at one of these probability filters.
>
> [Scott:] To show that neo-Darwinism is scientific, you have to know
> what the probabilities are, and that they are plausible.
>
> msh says:
> This is simply not true. All we need for scientific plausibility is
> logical inference from fact. We observe mutations, most of which are
> negative and die out. But we can EASILY imagine mutations that are
> positive and lead to, in time, a species latch-up: the fish with a
> fin that can grip the ground; and later, add a set of mutant gills
> that don't do well pulling oxygen from water but work fine in
> extremely humid air.
How many unuseful latches (otherwise useless proteins) have to hang around
not getting deselected before all are in place to do each of these steps?
>
> There is nothing unscientific about this line of thought. In fact, I
> would say that this is the essence of scientific hypothesis.
It is arm-waving, not science. So is the ID position. One needs more than
"logical inference from fact". It is logically possible for chance and
natural selection to account for the changes in biological form that we are
aware of. The scientific question is, is it plausible?, and to answer that
one needs to know the probabilities.
- Scott
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