Tom English: (If Mung does not know that authors at Evolution News and Views often disagree with one another, but never point out their disagreements, then I’ve given him way too much credit. For instance, Dembski told us that “evolutionary search” really does search for targets. But Meyer and Axe have both gone out of their ways to explain that “evolutionary search” actually does not search.)
Did Tom ever reveal his sources?
New article up at Evolution News and Views:
Douglas Axe on Evolution’s Search Problem
Are they flat out lying?
Allan Miller,
Forgive me for not reviewing your posts, and asking a question that you’ve possibly answered already. Don’t phylogenies constructed from sequence data indicate that many proteins derive from relatively few ancestral proteins? Rumraket mentions a dozen studies, but it seems to me that Axe is telling us that an entire field of investigation is invalid.
Journal club – Protein Space. Big, isn’t it?
Protein Space and Hoyle’s Fallacy – a response to vjtorley.
Edit: fixed links.
Rumraket,
Thanks Mikkel, much appreciated.
That is exactly what he says, yes.
One paper he published in “bio-complexity” basically amounts to:
“phyloschmylo, these two proteins in the same superfamily are separated in function by at least 7 mutations, and it might be as many as 20-30, and my own model of evolution (curiously enough also published in bio-complexity) says that’s too many mutations for evolution in the entire history of life”.
Anyway, off to bed. Will write that post tomorrow.
I’d go for it only if a Pastafarian were funded also. That would make for an interesting longitudinal study.
Rumraket,
Thanks. I genuinely did not mean to favor Allan’s advice over yours. I just responded to the comment I happened to be looking at.
dazz,
ID is an inference to the best explanation based on the observation of design in nature. The only thing it says is after looking at all the data it looks like an intelligent cause over say UCD. ID is not capable of answering the how questions at least at this point. If an ID guy says that they can predict junk DNA that is bunk. I have had a couple of conversations with Mike Behe and he agrees.
You’re missing the point somehow.
Explanations have logical consequences when they’re actually explanations. “Design” is no explanation at all because it doesn’t tell us anything that might help us make sense of the data. Therefore ID is dead on departure as a scientific theory.
But that’s not my point: since ID is meaningless all you guys have is negative arguments on evolution. Those arguments DO have logical consequences: if you believe there’s no gradual pathway available for evolution, that means saltation. If IC and FSCO/I prevent evolution from building complex life forms gradually, that must mean FSCO/I is generated in one fell swoop. I know I have a tendency to repeat myself, but the only way to reconcile that with the undeniable evidence of common descent is to affirm that every now and then creatures produce descendants of an entirely different… kingdom maybe? not sure about that but you get the gist.
It’s either that or flat out rejection of UCA and then you’re entering YEC territory with special creation ex-nihilo, A.K.A. going full retard
Wait a minute, you are indeed going full retard right there. So you are ready to deny UCD if the only alternative is to accept evolution… I can tell you something: there’s no way you can possibly do that “after looking at all the data”. The fact is that you’re not willing to let the data (and the logic) get in the way of your beliefs
But no one has ever observed the design of biological life in nature. Every last argument for ID takes the form “I personally don’t understand how this could arise naturally so ID wins by default”. Every. Last. One.
Did you ever meet an evolution argument you didn’t like?
Whatever answer annoys you the most, that is the right answer.
The value of your posts has dwindled considerably Allan. Did you give Richard your password?
Why don’t you try actually writing something?
Hear!! Hear!!
Finally something on the Skeptikal Zone we can all agree on! Let’s celebrate. Tom English is a computer engineer, he doesn’t know shit about biology.
If that wasn’t already obvious…
It searches for the one that can put its arm closest to the fucking computer generated box-didn’t you even watch it!@!! It has ZERO to do with what can reproduce best. God! Grab the dam food! If you can do that you win!
Oh, I get it, you are using Patrick’s strategy, force your opponent to break the rules, by posting such utter stupidity, they will be forced to blame the garbage you write on the fact that its because you really are that ….no, no! You can’t win like that!
You, YOU @##@, Richard!!!
Bwahahahahahah! That’s part of the introduction, not even “polyworld”. I think we now all know who didn’t watch / understand it all.
Priceless. You get everything wrong. Keep reading ID “for educational purposes”
phoodoo,
As you’re a credentialist, Phoodoo, what qualifies you?
If design were an intellectually honest scientific inference–even if stupid and wrong–there’s no way that anyone could pretend that one couldn’t infer characteristics of the design process (and likely the designer as well) from what was produced. It’s true that life is quite unlike what humans produce (first hint that there’s nothing scientific going on–they’re constantly “analogizing” to human design, ignoring the fact that it’s more of an “anti-analogy,” if you will) and thus unlike anything we’ve seen designed (even animal “designs” aren’t very unlike human designs, even if the brain activity is different in important ways), but one could still figure out that this design process was rather limited in certain ways, yet quite fantastically capable of dealing with complexity.
OK, basically one would have to suppose that the designer was a computer (or possibly a brain) operating according to a genetic algorithm. The Designer is a blind watchmaker, amazingly capable of dealing with the detailed complexity of the present and the single organism (or population), but quite incapable of thinking across the divide of non-interbreeding organisms (I’ll stick with sexual organisms for simplicity) and quite incapable of thinking ahead. It doesn’t make rational leaps, it just changes things relatively little at a time, using and re-using what came beforehand–with the possible exception of some leaps, like the advent of eukaryotes (I doubt it, but you know, can’t be ruled out entirely at present, which gives hope to the desperate).
Of course what did we just do? We had to define the Designer as something very like evolutionary processes, as a kind of fantastic computer running genetic algorithms–with the possible exception of some few leaps here and there that still re-use information like evolutionary processes do. But what’s wrong with that? Surely it’s possible that some computer–or even some brain–is both that capable and incapable at the same time, hence it’s fine for a (relatively) intellectually honest ID inference.
There is a scientific problem, of course, which is that one doesn’t really try to come up with new causes that mimic discovered causes, like some storm god who thinks according to temperature gradients, elevations, and condensation that acts almost exactly like thermodynamics and the Coriolis Effect do in a complex topography. Likewise, you don’t come up with genetic algorithms by observing evolutionary results, then turn around and assume that genetic algorithms did it rather than evolutionary processes. But IDists do such things all of the time, trying to claim that intelligence is responsible for the limitations for which we evoke evolution, so for them it should be all right, if straying to a degree from true intellectual integrity.
So why not a Designer who is a computer having robots to do its bidding, all the while it is running highly complex genetic algorithms? Clearly it’s because the “design inference” is not a genuine inference to design at all (rather a muddled confusion of complex function and design), but is apologetics attempting to save a God who is claimed to be very much unlike the limits of genetic algorithms and of evolutionary processes. Of course we could make inferences about the process of design, if life had been designed, for the same reason that we make inferences about evolution. The problem is that proper inferences from observing life is that it has the limits you’d expect of evolutionary processes or of genetic algorithms lacking in any kind of purpose, and they’re trying to claim anything but those kinds of limits.
Hence they must cheat and pretend that design can be inferred but not studied. That’s beyond stupid, as design reflects the designer (or at least the design process, or program). And life’s “design” reflects a “blind designer,” possibly autistic or some such thing. IDists don’t like the implications, hence they claim that design is obvious while supposing that design would not reflect the limitations of the Designer. Trouble is, the Designer isn’t supposed to have limits.
That’s why we know that ID isn’t really an inference from the evidence at all–not even a really dumb one–merely an inference from religion. It isn’t even necessarily dumb (clearly some intelligence is needed to obfuscate and pretend to be all sciency, even if not a great level), it just doesn’t come from the evidence.
Glen Davidson
Phoodoo has confused http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html with https://github.com/polyworld/polyworld. This isn’t because of his terrible understanding of evolution but because he can’t follow a simple narrative, read words on a screen and focus until the end of a video.
But you’ll tell us what’s what’s with evolution, Right Phoodoo?
dazz,
I don’t need to accept evolution or ID. Both have their own problems. There is evidence that supports both explanations IMHO. They are theories with tradeoffs. I think the neo darwinian synthesis that is taught in the text books is beyond broken and the interesting thing I found being part of these blogs is most who support evolution as a concept agree. My opinion is that this biology stuff is really tough and I think you are going full retard if you take a hard position with so little data.
Adapa,
I agree with you except Mike Behe has a positive argument for design with his discussion of complex micro machines that look like human designs at the molecular level.
colewd,
I’m not sure analogy = “positive argument”.
As Isaac Asimov wrote, when people thought the world was flat, they were wrong. When they thought it was a sphere, they were also wrong, but there are degrees of wrong and the sphere notion is MUCH closer to the reality.
Now, I don’t need to accept the flat OR the round earth. Both have their own problems. There is evidence that supports both explanations.
Right? Do you see the problem there? Asimov did.
Well, a tree looks kinda like a broom, and humans invented brooms, therefore this is a positive argument for trees being designed. Works for me!
Evidence can’t support “explanations” that can’t explain facts, or as you admitted, answer the “how” questions. Those are not (scientific) explanations at all. Will that ever sink? I don’t think so
You’re beginning to sound like FFM. In what sense do those who support the modern synthesis of evolution in these blogs agree that evolution is beyond broken?
There’s tons of data, you’re just turning a deaf ear to it all. And there’s a theory that makes sense of it. Hint: it’s not ID
Being tough and being unevidenced aren’t quite the same thing. There are two tough things about biology. For most people, it’s that biology is enormously complex and messy. This means the evidence, while abundant, requires many years of careful study if it’s going to make sense. And for some people the tough thing is ADMITTING that there is abundant evidence.
The evidence for gravity is scant, if I elect never to look at any of it. And I’m well aware that if my religious faith denied gravity, I simply COULD NOT see the evidence for it. Someone could spend eternity dropping bricks on my feet, and I STILL couldn’t see any evidence for gravity.
Richardthughes,
Its the same fucking thing you…you, don’t tempt me!
You needed me to type in:
” the color of every critter is an Archibee triplet, so the redder a critter is is how aggressive it is at this moment, the bluer a critter is is how much it wants to mate, and the green is genetic..”
or Perhaps:
“So now I am going to show you some intelligent behavior (he doesn’t mean his speaking prowess obviously) that has emerged from this. So this is to show you that they are actually doing something ,all right. They actually use their vision. So a critter is going to come by, and the critter lurched forward. And see that, Okay! Here, well, ok, there’s more of them. Yeah, yeah, see, it jump forward. So all this is really saying is they are actually using their eyes for something. And they are using their eyes to control their behavior. So simple enough, not very big claim.”
Or;
“I always get this from philosophers a lot, they always say, oh, its not alive. Well, fortunately there is a good definition of life. Its the Farmer-Belin, the artificial revolution, published from the Santa Fe Institute. And basically it has these measured criteria to determine if something is alive. And Polyworld was designed to satisfy all of these criteria. So in short, yes, kind of space time, it does reproduce, it does have creature storage, it does eat, and it has interactive environment, and it does evolve. So in short, to that, well, it does fit the definition of life that most people use. So, so, So in your face”
Would that have helped Richard?
phoodoo,
Well done Phoodoo. You’ve watched more of the video. One day you’ll stop making the same idiotic mistake of just looking at the very start of something, leaping to the wrong conclusion, writing about your misconception and being laughed at. Which you’ve done, repeatedly. But today is not that day.
Again:
What is it searching for, Phoodoo. And where is that explicit in the code?
https://github.com/polyworld/polyworld
Ah, Archy Bee. Creator of the display that mimics our own eyes as explained here: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/colourmaps/ 0_o
Richardthughes,
Its target is to get close to a colored box…which you can call food or a colored box, its the same target.
You needed that explained to you, because you actually believe it is really eating . You actually believe, just like the dimwitted presenter, that these pixels on a computer screen are alive, because they move in patterns.
You think Pong is alive. That is you Richard.
phoodoo,
Wrong. Was the video too hard for you?
That’s funny, in a podcast with Matt Dillahunty you pretty much unambigously stated that evolution is total nonsense. So did you go full retard there or was that just a slip?
Out of the two, which is more supported and which is less supported?
Phoodoo,
Just give up. You’ll probably actually achieve more!
It’s a waste of time to ask this question of Colewd. He doesn’t understand that to have evidence for a hypothesis, that hypothesis needs to make quantifiable predictions(and he also doesn’t understand what a quantifiable prediction is). Yet he admits ID makes none.
He doesn’t even know how the evidence for evolution works or why it is evidence for evolution. He has literally no idea how one infers common descent or constructs the simples phylogeny.
That means colewd needs to learn basic philosophy of science before he even begins tackling a scientific subject of any kind.
Exactly. Good luck getting Bill Cole to grasp this concept. He’s still stuck at the “it looks like a motor”-level of inference.
Haha omg, so it seems there’s been creationist editing on the wikipedia article on ATP binding motif. Look at this supremely dumb shit highlighted in bold:
Wat? Protein enzymes have “coopted ATP binding motifs” from each other, just by definition?
Who wrote that crap? And how in the hell does protein evolution relate to micro-evolution? Micro evolution is evolution below the species level, it is entirely unrelated to what happens to proteins which are not classifed in terms of species.
Clearly the lunatic who wrote that crap was trying to insinuate something along the lines of “no new information” is created when an ATP binding motif evolves, by claiming that they don’t actually evolve at all, but rather just get swapped around to different proteins.
Somebody sat there and typed that shit out knowing full well he was telling a falsehood. Not a single reference is given.
Tom English,
Yeah, I never finished mine! I simply wasn’t getting anywhere with my experiments. Had I got there, I would have been an accredited expert in the role of tocopherol oxidase in control of photoperiodism in the plant Xanthium strumarium. And nothing else.
Haha, that sounds technical enough to flabbergast basically every ID proponent in existence.
If you ever find yourself in need of a little monetary injection you can always milk the “I was a PhD student doing technical research and was once an atheist”-cow.
Tom English,
Yes – there are phylogenies within phylogenies. The fact that protein folds and domains cluster on relatively fewer families – of the order of one or two thousand – is strongly supportive of parts of proteins being commonly descended from other parts of the same genome in the same lineage. This module shuffling makes a nonsense of attempts to treat sequence as rigidly linear; a START-STOP delimited sequence of N residues that can only be amended by point mutation.
And in fact it’s not just sequence data. The very lability of certain protein motifs means that sequence can be entirely lost, while only structure remains, like the Cheshire cat’s smile: 🙂
Confronted with such a structure-only relationship, one might regard this as a ‘de novo’ peptide, when it isn’t, and demand to know how this new sequence was generated from scratch, when it wasn’t.
I read the ‘dozen studies’ as relating to the ability of random peptide space to yield functional members at pretty high density, and subsequent tuning within that neighbourhood to arrive at an a priori unlikely point.
Axe is talking of the fact that you cannot change an existing peptide in every dimension without negative effect. Which is true, but trivial.
Rumraket,
Rumraket, what are you talking about? The presenter himself begins the conversation by stating he is not even remotely an expert in string theory or evolution, but then quickly adds the “atheist-skeptic” talking point that evolution by natural selection has such a wealth of evidence behind and has such predictive power it that it would be a miracle to overturn it. Who is being the idiot there Rumraket?
What is this wealth of evidence for evolution by natural selection? Lenskis bacteria? Galapagos finches?
What predictive power is he talking about? Give me a fucking break.
The atheist presenter is then asked how important is the theory of evolution to athesism, and he says not at all, because after all there are religious people who believe in the theory of evolution. Ok, but are there athesist who DON”T believe in the theory of evolution? How can they? What then accounts for life? Some OTHER completely random accident of physics?
Oh brother. Are you going full retard Rumraket?
Rumraket,
Even worse, if anyone could stand listening to this skeptics talking point regurgitator, is when asked a very specific point about the difference between specific codes in the genome, and how can one accept that this is evidence for common ancestry, by virtue of its specificity, but reject at the same time Dembski’s argument that this shows specific complexity, he just hits the rails and just starts mumbling anything he can think of that he once saw on talkpoints.org…
“Well, natural selection is not random you see, so, and plus there is the “Steves Project, and well, I won’t get into that, and, and I would agree with Francis Collins, and, and Ken Miller, he is a Catholic, and the Dover Trial, and the fusion of chromosome 2…”
The guy is such an uneducated windbag, he can’t even understand the questions being asked of him.
But that doesn’t stop 50,000 people from watching his videos, including you, because you are also a skeptic regurgitating mouthpiece.
phoodoo,
Yes.
My descents into snark tend to be in the company of snarks. Not saying it’s your fault, but I’d be much less of an arse if you were.
Rumraket,
Probably some creo edited the page to link it somewhere else. It’s been unchanged since May 30th, ugh!
colewd,
I would be interested to hear from any non-Creationist here who thinks that the neo Darwinian synthesis is ‘beyond broken’.
The evolution part is actually one of the easier areas, if you avoid the math.
I really don’t see how the extensive molecular phylogenies that support common descent can be so airily dismissed, and replaced by something that has no associated rationale for its capacity to be analysed as if it were a signal of phylogeny when it isn’t.
Allan Miller,
Gee Allan, maybe you could list a few of the well meaning, polite skeptics who post here, so we can all know who to emulate? There must be a lot right, I just can’t seem to think of any right now.
The only polite posters I can name on this site are William Murray and FWW, and Colewd, and Mung most of the time , and well, the only ones I can think of are all those who disagree with the bullies here. How strange.
Help me out, show me some of your shining beacons of integrity.
Alan is probably the only one of yours that even tries (thus I rarely am insulting towards him).
phoodoo,
I’m not talking about any other posters, I am talking about you. (Though, you obviously missed WJM’s meltdown!).
You chide me for a bit of snark, while being one of the more obnoxious of your breed.
Writing that post is taking longer than I first expected because I don’t just want to mindlessly cite literature, but explain why it’s evidence that overwhelmingly contradicts Axe’s claims. So I’ll have to modify my plan to “sometime later this week”. Stay tuned.
Definitely no Ph.D. snobbery here. It was anything but a foregone conclusion that my dissertation research would go well. My department probably would have kept me on as a lecturer, had I needed to take a second go at it. But I doubt that my wife and son would have put up with any more than they did.
The Relativity of Wrong.
Where in the code is that target specified? (Hint: You won’t find it because you’re wrong.)