In his recent video Michael Behe explains the reasons for his acceptance of common descent.
Do you find it confusing?
Most members of the Discovery Institute find the idea of common descent lacking. Behe, ‘for the sake of the argument’ , is willing to accept it and, instead, focus on the mechanism of Darwinian evolution, natural selection and random mutations, as insufficient to explain evolution.
Here is an example of what I mean:
If a five pound land walking mammal is an ancestor of a 50 ton whale, through common descent, and the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on variations is insufficient to explain their ancestry, as per Behe’s own admission, isn’t his acceptance of common descent confusing, or even contradictory?
If the mechanism of evolution can’t account for common descent, why would anybody accept it?
Watch the video and judge it for yourself…
ETA: Larry Moran is using Behe’s acceptance of common descent as evidence that he (Behe) accepts evolution…https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2011/08/evolution-is-fact-and-theory.html?showComment=1581708597421#c1276531141808451482
So, we have pattern now…
Do we have exceptions to the pattern?
Fading?
Does Behe know that?
I don’t need Nelson or Ewert to know that it’s more than faded evolutionary speculative nonsense…
Behe has worry about how to get out of it now…
I think I’ve seen the same comment from him more than few times other than “someone has to defend this got damn country..”
I think he enjoys torturing people, especially you…🤗
<
J-Mac,
I know he thinks natural selection is the magic solution and he believes the blind watchmaker can make functional information. I know he defends evolutionary dogma with school boy valor. Does he have a clue about what he is discussing?
J-Mac,
There is common descent to some extent we all agree. Behe is not really offering anything with his statement other than there is evidence for common descent. You really don’t disagree with that statement in its face value. There are some left who think it is universal and unguided but this is the minority view.
Where the lines of demarkation are is where a real debate is. ie do we share a common ancestor with chimps? Do we share a common ancestor with fish? Do we share a common ancestor with e coli bacteria? Does yeast share a common ancestor with e coli bacteria?
The important question is If any of these are true what is the mechanism that caused this transition?
If we want to have a population genetics discussion on how blue eyes move through a specific animal population we all agree we can do a statistical analysis.
If we want to have a discussion how a set of eyes evolves and gets fixed in a population that’s where the skepticism arises.
colewd:
Translation:
A funny exchange from 2017:
colewd:
keiths, quoting Behe:
Poor Bill.
Hey Bill, how long have you believed that lying about the evolutionary sciences will get you into heaven?
Aren’t you ashamed of all the stupid Creationist lies you regurgitate?
Yes. That’s what the evidence shows.
Yes. That’s what the evidence shows.
Yes. That’s what the evidence shows.
Yes. That’s what the evidence shows.
Speciation occurs when two parts of a population become reproductively isolated from one another through a physical barrier, behavioral differences, or genetic differences. Each population then continues to evolve independently (through mutations, selection, and drift) and diverge from each other. That’s Biology 101 which you’ve had explained to your dumbass too many times to count.
You really should be ashamed to be so willfully ignorant. Really ashamed.
Probably. Does that mean there’s no pattern?
Here is an interesting case study. The rats of New York have closest genetic kinship with European rats, particularly British ones. Presumably they came across with human immigrants in sailing ships. But also, there is divergence of rat genetics across Manhattan, particularly promoted by a midtown barrier, across which gene flow is attenuated.
All this, origin, divergence and distribution, is (presumably) accepted by Creationists without blinking. Genetic tests on the assumption of common descent are valid – even though there are likely to be ‘exceptions’ to pattern – identity by homoplasy instead of descent, for example.
But when it comes to rats and mice, say, the heels go in. ‘What of the exceptions?”, they crow. Suddenly, all they can see are reasons to doubt, and blind themselves to the overwhelming pattern. Because of course they can’t allow a ‘secular foot in the door’, even though the objections become absurd at one taxonomic level or another.
Behe is too smart for that.
Can we try the lance rather than the bludgeon as a verbal weapon?
Alan approved!!
Interesting point, could you expand on the hammer theme a little more. Mr. Fox probably also is interested.
I, for one, really enjoy your contributions. You have a unique perspective, that only a true atheist, at TSZ, could deliver. And I mean that.
It’s something to do while we wait for you, colewd and J-Mac to decide if you all pray to the same thing.
That’s him
Ah, I forgot. You believe in miracles.
Oh, I can see the obvious reasons, but wouldn’t have guessed there were others as well. Would you share them? What makes you so sure the Designer created all species a-new? Lions and tigers are not related? Zebra’s and horses are not related? Great tits and blue tits are not related? Just because a five pound land walking mammal cannot be transformed into a 50 ton whale?
Bill, you are rationalizing and doing it very badly. If this were true, that would mean your big hero is being dishonest about his position on common descent. Are you really OK with that?
Can you define functional information? If so, can you tell me where and how to measure it in biota?
Mind you don’t expose yourself as an ardent dogmatist with a poor grasp of the dogma.
Thank you for the quote. I was pretty sure that I’d never before seen Behe say that he accepts common descent just “for the sake of argument,” as in the video.
Today, most people with a serious interest in ID are actually YECs. Over the past five or so years, the Discovery Institute has been making nice with the YECs, to stay afloat financially. Behe’s video is an attempt at diplomacy.
I’ve only seen J-Mac refer to genuses and kinds, not to species. It’s not a sure bet that he’s a YEC. But the odds are in favor of it. ID proponents who are not YECs rarely emphasize kinds as YECs do.
Mung once made the apt remark that YECs are “evolutionists on steroids.” Anyone who’s visited Ark Park knows that, as zoos go, Noah’s Ark was quite small. YECs now say that representatives of all of the kinds, not all of the species, were saved from death in the Great Flood. Non-stupid YECs say that there has been rapid evolution within kinds over the past 4300 years. Some say that God has guided the evolution. Others, like John Sanford, say that the evolution is actually driven by deterioration in genomes (genetic entropy). [ETA: I don’t track YECism, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a YEC scientist say, at one of the main YEC websites, that natural selection accounts for diversification within kinds.]
The contemporary YEC response to Darwin’s “tree of life” is the “orchard of life.”
Tom English,
This is the definition we have been using from Hazen and Szostak. How it’s being measured is to estimate the number of functional sequences.
The technique of measuring I have used is to use the uniprot alignment tool and see what the functional constraint over reasonable periods of time is. The sample size is greater than 5 animals. This assumes common descent or common design of the particular protein we are aligning. If a substitution or mis alignment is observed then the position is assumed unimportant.
The ratio then becomes the preserved sequences divided by the total sequence space. This is a very loose way to measure it but since since the total sequence space is so large accuracy is not that critical. If we say the threshold for disqualifying a random origin is 150 bits then if we have 151 bits we can estimate with at least a 50% error in the calculation and use infinite population size as the total sequence space is so large.
Where this technique becomes interesting is when you see information change at certain evolutionary transitions.
Corneel,
Behe is a smart guy and very straight forward. It is fair game to take advantage of a scientific theory with poor definitions. Common descent is defined so loosely that everyone agrees it is true.
When Behe says he believes in common descent but this is trivial what do you think he means?
This is a good observation, Tom.
I rarely refer to species, because there is no agreement among the majority of scientists, including evolutionary biologists and such, what constitutes a species…
Perhaps, we could use the example of the fox breed to properly define it?
Is the breed of silver and red fox mix a new species?
Is it an intermediate?
How long is it going to take for the silver/red fox mix breed to become a new species, since the changes seen on the picture take place within one generation?
How is it going to be determined what constitutes a new species?
It seems all supporters of evolution here claim given enough time, the silver/red fox mix/breed will evolve into another kind of organism, for the lack of better work…
Silver/red fox mix
silver vs red fox
I don’t consider myself a creationist because there is a lot of confusion about what the term means…
I’d refer to myself as Purposeful Design supporter, which in my view is different than ID…
Like Behe, I know that common descent cannot be extrapolated beyond genus, or kinds, with some minor exceptions… because there is no mechanism to explain it and obviously even within genus and kinds the variations are often caused by the loss of information in DNA; often loss of function (s).
Looks like you were right that J-Mac prefers the use of “kinds” over “species”. The problem is that I am having some trouble locating the boundaries of “kinds”. In my experience, creationists tend to wield a taxonomic scaling that is growing more coarse-grained with increasing distance from humans. In hominids it maps nicely onto species, but the domains of eubacteria and archaea tend to get lumped together into bacteria.
That would do nicely for now, since that entails the implicit acknowledgement that lineage branching and lineage change do occur. All I am trying to do is to separate arguments about mechanisms of evolutionary change from those with bearing on common descent.
Actually, John must, because unless some genes appeared miraculously, endosymbiosis couldn’t have taken place..There are more miracles required for the evolution of prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic, but this one will do for now… 😉
You have the opportunity to show your in-depth knowledge on this OP; i.e. fox evolution for example… 😉
Maybe you should tell us where the boundaries of species are?
J-Mac,
These strenuous leaps from one end of the eukaryote taxonomy to the other – almost as if to draw a veil over the bit in between.
Glad to hear it. Does “everyone” include you? Is common descent defined strictly enough to include common ancestry of humans and chimpansees?
I read that as saying that he completely accepts common descent of all living species, but that as far as he is concerned the concept that there is purpose in evolution is the more exciting topic. What do you think?
If evolution were true, species would indeed be hard to pin down at the point of bifurcation, because a continuous process of divergence would get a little fuzzy at the edges. No such expectation with Design, however. And yet there it is, that fuzziness. The difficulty with species concepts is often asserted a weakness of evolutionary theory. It isn’t.
Exceptions to pattern is what the problem with this assumption…
It makes no sense in this case…
Check it out! 😉
So you do accept common descent, but are unwilling to extrapolate it beyond the “kind” level? And the reason that you are unwilling to do this is because you are convinced that the Designer did not start with one single kind and did not intervene to resupply the “information” in existing kinds? Is that a fair summary of your position?
This claim is crucial. If you use it loosely, people will misrepresent it, like Larry Moran has done it many times…
I have descended from my father, and he from my grandfather, and my kids from me…This common descent is obvious and nobody questions it…
Exactly!
In my opinion, Behe has to really make sure, when he says he accepts common descent for the sake of argument, where that demarcation is exactly…
Otherwise, people will point to Behe and say: He accepts common descent, which means he believes a 5 pound land walking mammal evolved into a 50 ton whale…
Can you seem the problem his claims create?
Show me something specific that is ‘problematic’, then, don’t just handwave at it.
The vast majority of sites show the pattern. Those that don’t conform are a few instances of HGT or homoplasy – and those wouldn’t even show up were it not for the broader pattern.
Your attempts to dismiss the pattern by pointing to anomalies actually confirms the pattern, because without a pattern nothing would be anomalous.
Read the thread!
You’ve cut into the conversation I had with colewd about so-called GULO “pseudogene”…
If you can’t remember your own comments, what would you like me to do?
Corneel,
I simply don’t think this subject has any significant meaning to him. He will tell you this is possible and he even has a Devine pool shot speculation but that’s hardly a commitment to the idea . He is focused on the inferred design observed in the cell.
If you look at Theobald’s paper in around 2000 he tries to argue common descent independent of a mechanism. I do believe this partially is a result of the pressure that ID and Behe put on the EB community based on some debates that occurred between ID and the NCSE about that time. Is evolutionary theory of universal common descent really a theory without a mechanism? I think this is the point J Mac is trying to drive home. When I asked Behe this question he gave me the Devine pool shot analogy.
Given the effort that Tom and Joe are putting in to try to salvage the conceptual life of the blind watchmaker I think J Mac has a point.
He’s smart enough to make lots of money by selling pseudoscience garbage books to scientifically illiterate rubes like you. You don’t mind being lied to by Behe and the rest of the DI clowns because they feed your religious Creationist beliefs. You end up looking like the moron while they laugh all the way to the bank.
Reading the thread might help you. You said (to keiths, not colewd) ‘I’ve a feeling it’s about G(U)LO’, I said ‘there’s far more than GULO in support of common descent’, you said ‘what about the anomalies’, I said ‘they demonstrate the existence of the broader pattern’.
What are you saying now? It’s only about GULO? But there’s more to it than GULO!
I’m tired. Find someone else to talk to…sorry
Agreed
Could you explain? This is the idea that the Creator set up the universe just right for life to develop in some predetermined way?
Yes, it is a statement about the relatedness of all living things. Since extant organisms look very different from each other, it requires that some mechanism of evolutionary change exists, but doesn’t specify what that mechanism is. You could insert supernatural Designers here, if your fancy takes you that way.
Given that the blind watchmaker is a metaphor for evolution by natural selection, with no obvious link to common descent, I think J-Mac is as confused as ever.
Oh, and don’t think I didn’t notice you didn’t answer my first two questions 😉
Posting is entirely voluntary, of course, but generally if you say something you can reasonably expect others to say something too. It’s how these places operate.
What?!!!
What is this “Divine pool shot analogy”, colewd?
Is it in his Darwin Devolves book? Maybe I should finally read it? lol
Theobald’s paper relates to this OP because he attempts, at least in theory, to differentiate micro-evolution and macro-evolution…
His speculations, though clearly misguided, can help some to understand the evolution, or change within genus or kinds, though doing a separate OP on the 29 evidence for evolution is probably a much better idea…
J-Mac,
You should be able to figure it out from the four-word description, but if you can’t, it’s on p. 205 of The Edge of Evolution.
And no, it doesn’t involve God and his kids trying to disprove relativity with an old pool table.
I have to agree with Tom and Joe, that Dembski, and later others, like EricHM, have begun, and continued, the idea with the conservation of information, CSI, etc.
Though I didn’t hear it from Dembski, I have a feeling he realized that his idea was a recipe for disaster…
We have seen it here…
Math can be cooked in many different ways, and, if that doesn’t work, the omnipotent natural selection comes to the rescue… Back and forth, name calling and accusations…
In the end, nobody of them really admitted the actual practical value of their endeavors…
I personally know, and I have said it many times before, even if someone, somewhere, one day, finds the application of Dembski’s math in biology, I will be very surprised…
The math application to biology has to move to another level of information theory and everyone here probably already knows which level it is…
I don’t have the book…never read it either…or maybe just some parts…Can’t remember…
Behe makes it clear, in the video, that he’s talking about universal common descent — as he has been since Darwin’s Black Box (1996). Try shutting up for 4 minutes and 42 seconds, and listening carefully to him.