So that’s why the Scots And Irish wear kilts? Both have their own iteration of bagpipes.
I always thought they wore them because the sound of a zipper stampedes the sheep.
Creationist lies and propaganda, and of course even were these lies scientifically credible, and evolution entirely reversed, it wouldn’t remotely evidence any deity, or any of the archaic creation myths associated with such theistic beliefs.
There are several explanations about drop bears.
Mine is that Koalas get drunk eating fermented gum leaves. Then they fall (drop) out of their tree.
On some rare occasions, a drop bear will break its fall and the neck of some hapless tourist.
Despite this being contents theft, this needs to be addressed. Irreducible complexity is an argument from personal incredulity combined with a straw man. The straw man part is that evolution is given a goal, as if the mutations went from the state A to the state F without going through the steps B, C, D, and E, as if F was the end goal. Or, to use an analogy: Imagine that you’re building the Pantheon dome in Rome:
How would you do it? Do you start with the top and build downwards? Do you start at the east end and work westwards? Nah. You start by building the foundations, and you build upwards and enable the work and support the whole thing by scaffolding. When you have built the walls (which serves a purpose in themselves, and is obviously better than no walls), you then extend and reinforce the scaffolding when you start building the dome. You create a shell on top of the scaffolding to hold the concrete in place as you pour it, and you extend it as work progresses. And for each step, the building gets better and better in increments. Then, when the dome is finished and the concrete has hardened, you don’t need the scaffolding anymore, and you can tear it down. After the scaffolding has been removed, the engineering deniers come along and claim that it would have been impossible to build this dome and claim God did it (“How can you lift this massive dome up and place its rim on top of the walls? That’s impossible! God did it!”). And that’s exactly the irreducible complexity argument. Its proponents neglect the intermediate stages and the parts of the construction that could have served as a half-way solution, the parts of the construction that has been torn down after the building was finished, and that parts of the early parts of the structure might have changed its original purpose during building. And that’s where the argument from personal incredulity comes in – evolution deniers don’t understand how a biological structure could have evolved, so they invoke supernatural explanations.
And that’s the essence of the refutation of the irreducible complexity argument.
I much prefer the taller tales with the large, vicious, predatory and carnivorous koalas. They separate those with a healthy sense of independent thought and skepticism from those without. I’d much rather have conversations and social interaction with representatives of the former group than with the latter.
Pete, welcome to the forum.
Behe’s article "A True Acid Test was written in 2000, and Miller almost immediately replied in this article. Design on the Defensive
Miller replies to each of Behe’s criticisms with full and compelling explanations. Its a more an exercise in correcting Behe’s misunderstanding of what Miller wrote, from explaining that Miller had not said Hall had wiped out a “mulitpart” system, rather he writes “My description clearly and correctly states that Hall started his experiments “by deleting the structural gene for galactosidase”, a single gene.” Miller explains that by deleting this single gene, three components had to evolve to replace its function hence Behe’s misunderstanding.
There follows a detailed reply to Behe’s complaint that the replacement for the galactosidase enzyme emerges on a distant operon through minor mutations of existing materials. He enlarges on Behe’s statement that the ebg gene is “homologous” to the lac proteins and overlaps them in “activity” and shows Behe’s statements are at besst only partly true and “quite misleading”.
The rest of the article responds in detail to Behe’s article.
Since 2000 and the Dover trial Behe has staunchly maintained his stand for creationism, by seizing on every opportunity to denounce what he sees as weaknesses in “Darwinsim”. There are just a few things to point out.
“Darwinism” is not a thing. Darwin did not invent evolution which goes back to the writing of the ancient Greek naturalists. He introduced two important ideas, Natural Selection and Sexual Selection and he offered hypotheses on the basis of his more detailed findings which were later shown to be true.
It is the idea of Natural Selection that has generated over a hundred years of facile objections to evolutionary theory because some fundamentalist christians insists it displaces their god as the creator and caretaker of their cosmos. More reasonable theists understand their god, despite the Bible, being omnipotent could have easily created evolution and are content to accept the science as presented. Science has no goal to prove or disprove any god, as creationists like to rage. It simply shows how things work.
Secondly the scientific world has moved on from late 19th century findings and we now have mapped the human genome and those of many other animals. And we have developed the technology to track the detailed actions and precise chemical events that influence how genetic materials form and shape all those “endless forms most beautiful”.
Thirdly Behe’s defence of creationism and irreducible complexity has been addressed, soundly critiqued and evidenced to be false by thousands of active research scientists far more qualified and actively involved than Behe. At the time of writing Darwin’s Black Box (1996), Behe, as he admitted during the Dover trial, had not been involved in labaratory research work for over a decade.
Lastly Behe is obsessed with upholding the tenets creationist science because he holds the Bible to be the inerrant word of his god and that it is absolutely true. Science simply can not support personal or religious bias. He has no interest in furthering knowledge, only in furthering the objectives of his faith.
I have read hundreds of articles and books by research scientists, as I have already said, eminently more qualified than Behe, countering all his objections. His misconstrued attack on Miller over what was written by Hall was a strawman argument, as are most of his attacks against evolutionary science.
As always for a more up to date record of genetic evolution I recommend “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” by Prof. Sean Carrol - not the astophysicist - the other one - the biologist. This book also includes a fairly detailed look at the importance of studies into E.choli in the discovery of the working of genetics.
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Not to mention that the scale of evolutionary development usually takes a very long time.
If you factor in that there may be billions of organisms of the same type, that chance mutations do happen, that eventually the roll of the dice will result in a favorable offspring. It may take billions of random mutations before just one delivers a favorable outcome, but it can and does happen.
Perhaps after the thief has been banned, on a new thread.
Of course I understand such things tend to be plagiarised because those who do the stealing haven’t mastered abstract thought. El fucking stiffo. Not our problem. They come to our forum, they obey our rules or fuck off.
These two mechanisms cannot be stressed enough when addressing creationists, imho. Creationists (at least the ones I have been involved in discussions with) seem to downplay/neglect/forget/“forget”/suppress them, and keep on stabbing at the straw man idea that it is mutations alone that drive evolution. Another aspect of evolution they downplay/neglect/forget/“forget”/suppress (or simply not understand) is the time scales involved, and do not allow for time to do its job in letting natural/sexual selection do the systematic selection of traits caused by favourable mutations (or, if you prefer, weeding out the unfavourable traits).
It was these two very things that relegated Russell Wallace to a footnote in evolutionary theory.
Wallace published a curious book in 1889, “Darwinism : An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications”. Its primary purpose was to defend evolutionary theory against Lamarck’s theory of acquired characteristics. He did this by supporting August Weissman’s theory of heredity while at the same time rejecting Darwin’s concept of sexual selection which Wallace had considerable problems accepting, especially the idea of females selecting sexual partners, but then he was a perfect English Victorian mysogenist gentleman. Sexual monomorphism and sexual dimorphism are today both considered intrinsically important aspects of evolutionary theory and for those interested is worth looking up in your browser.
added…It may well be that the creationist argument is based on this book. It was suggested by one contempory reviewer that the title should have been “Wallacism” because in it he seemed to be pursuing a pure ideal of natural selection and I cant help but wonder if later theists have taken this later to mean the primary importance of mutations as the singular driving force for variation. Shrugs.
Despite his reputation as a cofounder of one of the most important scientific discoveries in history Wallace, like many famous people of that time, had a lifelong involvement with spiritualism, although not with religion, and ultimately he decided some time after the publication of “Darwinism” that the human brain could only have been made possible with the intervention of a divine agency. This abandonment of the two most important aspects of Darwin’s theory had no effect on their personal relationship, but did impact on his reputation as a scientist. Wallace was considered to be a bit of a loose cannon in his day. He originally opposed vaccination as an imposition on personal freedoms and then later, on biological grounds. However he did provide an experiment to disprove the flat earth theory which yes was also prevalent in the 1870s. Good and bad ideas seem to be imperishable.
I believe in giving everyone a second chance. I requested to our new theist friend that he edit out his plagiarism.
Everyone deserves a second chance.
Or at least plagerize sources that are not so common that everyone can find them. I generally get my bits of wisdome from the book of Apes, voluems 1, 2 and 3.
Problem is, by then I would have forgotten what was on my mind. Goldfish memory, you know. So I needed to…er…what?
Apparently that’s a myth.
https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2019/10/27/how-long-is-a-goldfishs-memory/
Yeah, I’m aware of that one. But what would the alternative common expression conveying the same idea be?
What about a happy clapper leaving church? 
Pausing to look at this for a moment:
This is merely another way of saying “If reality and my assertions differ, then reality is wrong and my assertions are right”.
On this basis, all of the wankery you have posted here can be dismissed without further ado, because you’ve just admitted that you think made up shit dictates how reality operates, regardless of how much reality pisses all over this hubristic presumption.
Meanwhile, taking a peek at this:
I can provide you with an even better demolition, courtesy of Hermann Joseph Müller. This one you should savour, as it’s particulary delicious. Müller was an evolutionary biologist who taught us what “irreducible complexity” actually means, as opposed to the strawman version erected by Behe and the IDists. Müller alighted upon the concept sixty years before Behe was born, and his deliberations on this phenomenon were published in a scientific paper in 1918. I’ve cited this paper repeatedly in past posts whenever this topic as arisen, but, for your benefit, I’ll provide not only the citation, but the relevant quote. The paper in question is:
Genetic Variability, Twin Hybrids and Constant hybrids in a Case of Balanced Lethal Factors by Hermann Joseph Müller, Genetics, 3(5): 422-499 (1918) [Original paper downloadable in full from here]
I shall quote directly from that paper , highlighting the requisite part that is apposite here:
In other words, “irreducible complexity” was arrived at by Müller before Behe was born and was posited by Müller not as a problem for evolution, but as a natural outcome of evolutionary processes. The so-called “Müllerian Two Step” is summarised succinctly as follows:
[1] Add a component;
[2] Make it necessary.
This was placed upon a rigorous footing by Müller himself, along with others such as Fisher, by the 1930s, and so Behe didn’t even find a gap for his purported god to fit into. Biologists have known that Behe’s “irreducible complexity” nonsense has been precisely that - nonsense - for a minimum of six decades. Indeed, the community of evolutionary biologists have a term to describe the Müllerian Two Step in more formal language, namely ‘bricolage’.
Indeed, I have posted at length in the past on the bacterial flagellum, and whilst the heavy scientific artillery I discuss in this post elsewhere might be rather a lot for the scientifically inexperienced to take on at one sitting, again, you’ll find much amusement to be had in learning just how much scientists have actually learned about the bacterial flagellum by performing real research, instead of carping and sniping from the sidelines whilst engaging in duplicitous apologetics, as the DI and its “fellows” have done. Indeed, the actual empirical research that has been performed on the bacterial flagellum blows Behe’s canards apart with a nuclear warhead.
As part of that research, not only have a large array of homologies been found between flagellar proteins and those of simpler, antecedent systems, establishing once again that evolution frequently presses old components into service in new systems, but it has been determined experimentally, that if one removes the gene for the flagellar protein known as FliI, then flagellar biosynthesis comes crashing to a halt, but if one then removes in addition the gene for the flagellar protein FliH, flagellar synthesis restarts, and the new flagellum works as well as the original. This on its own destroys Behe’s assertions on the subject, though in reality it’s merely the icing on the cake, as the other scientific papers I presented in that post demonstrate more than adequately.
All Behe did was coin a soundbite, and then present this duplicitously as if it constitutes a “problem” for evolutionary biology, when it does nothing of the sort. So-called “irreducibly complex” systems were postulated by Müller in 1918 to be a natural outcome of evolutionary processes, as the section of his paper I quoted above establishes. Behe simply erected a blind assertion (one of many, I might add, that were all refuted during the Dover Trial), to the effect that because he couldn’t work out how testable natural processes achieved the end result, this purportedly meant that no testable natural process could achieve the end result, and therefore, a magic man was purportedly needed. Those scientific papers I presented in that other post destroy this myth utterly. Behe’s sad little canard was known to be a canard before the sperm met the egg to form him.
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Fascinating stuff. Surely Dawkins should be aware of those studies? Or do I ask too much of a professor(?) of evolutionary biology?
Contrary to hyperbole, Richard Dawkins is apparently not a leading evolutionary biologist, simply a competent one. Nor is he much of a philosopher as far as I can tell. He is very good at self promotion.
It should perhaps also be noted that Richard Dawkins held the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. This is a position that was established for him, and he held it from 1995 to 2008. And the aim of the professorship is, as the name clearly states, to be a science communicator. And as a communicator of the science and theory of evolution, he has done a damn good job, in my opinion.
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