Remedial education for colewd

Posted on by

In the thread FMM throws Jesus under the bus, I had the following exchange with colewd:

colewd:

Until you have an eye there is nothing to select for. You have 300k of nucleotides drifting toward a meaningless group of sequences. Until you find a group of sequences that can provide reproductive advantage (sight) it is drift drift drift.

keiths:

This is just a version of the “what good is half an eye” PRATT.

Seriously, Bill, how can you possibly have missed everything that’s been written on this subject, from Darwin onward?

colewd:

No, I have read Dawkin’s ” just so” stories in the blind watchmaker and other books such as half a wing is better then none. I am surprised a man as sophisticated as you would fall for this bullshit. We do lack a hair bit of evidence that a one winged bird would even survive in the wild. If you want to argue that half an eye or a single wing or part of a wing aids in reproductive advantage, knock yourself out.

I am also surprised that a true skeptic as yourself would not have looked into this more carefully.

keiths:

Guffaw. Ever heard of bilateral symmetry, Bill? Do you really think birds needed to evolve one wing first, and then the other?

Man oh man are you clueless about biology.

Having dispensed with the one-winged bird objection, let’s see if we can get Bill beyond the “What good is half a wing?” canard.

To get the discussion started, I’ve linked to a relevant video from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute above.

180 thoughts on “Remedial education for colewd”

  2. GlenDavidson: Evolution is poof, because it lacks a proper poofster.

    Ignorance is her name. And anyone who dares question her, is mocked.

    Some of the reactions you see here, you’d think someone had taken a copy of The Origin and submerged it in urine and called it art.

    Did you ever stop to think that perhaps what Darwin thought wasn’t in fact the greatest thought ever?

    Blasphemy!

  4. Mung,

    Some of the reactions you see here, you’d think someone had taken a copy of The Origin and submerged it in urine and called it art.

    Hey, it’s your dollar.

  5. According the the video that apparently all creationist and I are afraid to watch, Dr. Dial claims that dinosaurs evolved feathers because their young needed it in order to run up and jump down trees or to catch pray?

    If that’s the case then surely normal dinosaur arms would do a better job…

    I think the same experiment could be done with emus and ostriches in order to make them lose weight and fly again…as long as nobody minds them pissing all over like a fire-hose…

  6. J-Mac: According the the video that apparently all creationist and I are afraid to watch, Dr. Dial claims that dinosaurs evolved feathers because their young needed it in order to run up and jump down trees or to catch pray?

    No he doesn’t.

    Glen Davidson

  7. And still no support by keiths for the claims made in the video. Is he ashamed of the video? Maybe he should take it down.

  8. We can take any class of animals and find similar high-tech systems working flawlessly. We don’t see half-wings and transitional forms, but completed technologies working at a very high level. Whenever we see that kind of performance in technologies we observed coming into being, we know they were produced by intelligent causes. Intelligent design seeks to consistently apply that principle uniformly in science

    https://evolutionnews.org/2017/09/cool-bird-tricks-the-longitude-problem-high-flying-ducks-and-more/

    So take that keiths!

  10. Rumraket,

    Isolation, migration, mutations, and genetic drift+natural selection. Yes, that is the cause of diversification. A subpopulation of a species gets isolated and/or migrates to a new environment so geneflow between two populations stops, so the new population independently accumulates a different set of genetic changes which are randomly sampled by drift and biased by natural selection. Eventually what was one species becomes two. Repeat millions of times and you have the diversity of life.

    How do we know this? It follows logically from our understanding of the mechanism of reproduction and genetic inheritance, and we can see it in the evidence for common descent. This really is a pretty well-established fact in science. And you’re in denial about it and are demanding a level of detail you demand for NOTHING ELSE in your entire life. Which, once again, makes you a hypocrite. A man with a double standard that he maintains because he’s deeply biased against facts that contradict beliefs he already hold.

    This demonstrates where your hypocrite claim is projection. You are trying to claim here that you have a detailed understanding of the cause of diversity of life and you don’t. You claim you understand how much detail I demand in other areas of my life and again you don’t.

    You have been sucked into Dawkins circular reasoning for atheism and are trying to throw as much bullshit as possible to make the claim credible but you can’t.

    The design claim is limited but it is honest about its limitation. Evolutionary claims that we understand the cause of the diversity of life are not honest.

  11. colewd: The design claim is limited but it is honest about its limitation.

    Like it’s lack of meaningful evidence? And spare us the mere recitation of complex matters that you fail to explain in the least.

    No, ID is grossly dishonest because it claims to have evidence of design while ignoring the crucial aspects of design that are missing from life, like thinking across lines of inheritance. The evidence is in fact contrary to honest design claims. That you don’t care indicates how vacuous ID is.

    Glen Davidson

  12. GlenDavidson: ID is grossly dishonest because it claims to have evidence of design while ignoring the crucial aspects of design that are missing from life, like thinking across lines of inheritance.

    So Glen acknowledges that there is evidence of design and claims to know that there are “crucial aspects of design that are missing from life.”

    That’s a refreshing stance for someone here to take.

  13. colewd: The design claim is limited but it is honest about its limitation. Evolutionary claims that we understand the cause of the diversity of life are not honest.

    From UD: The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.

    Positive evidence of design in living systems consists of the semantic, meaningful or functional nature of biological information, the lack of any known law that can explain the sequence of symbols that carry the “messages,” and statistical and experimental evidence that tends to rule out chance as a plausible explanation. Other evidence challenges the adequacy of natural or material causes to explain both the origin and diversity of life.

    Do you agree this is the design claim?

  14. colewd: This demonstrates where your hypocrite claim is projection.

    No, I’m not the one demanding a level of evidence from you, that I do not also apply to the things I already believe.

    You are trying to claim here that you have a detailed understanding of the cause of diversity of life and you don’t.

    I have a detailed enough understanding of the cause of the diversity of life, for it to be convincing to me.

    It is clearly not good enough for you, but because it is still MUCH MUCH better than the understanding you have of the design-explanation you believe in, it IS you who is the hypocrite among us.

    So to spell it out for you. The evidence for evolution is much better than the evidence for design. But you reject evolution, and you demand from it a level of evidence even higher still than what we have. Yet you believe in design, despite it’s COMPLETE FAILURE to bring even one single piece of positive evidence for design.

    You claim you understand how much detail I demand in other areas of my life and again you don’t.

    I don’t need to know the level of evidence you demand in every other area of your life. The fact that I can show even a single instance of differering standards on these two subjects is enough to prove the accusation of hypocricy.

    If you don’t want to believe in evolution, then fine, don’t. But if you also wish to STOP being the hypocrite that you are, you should ALSO stop believing in the design you clearly believe in. Because THAT explanation fails EVEN MORE than you think evolution does.

    You have been sucked into Dawkins circular reasoning for atheism and are trying to throw as much bullshit as possible to make the claim credible but you can’t.

    First of all: Please give me a single concrete example of “circular reasoning for atheism” that I believe. And it doesn’t even have to be from Richard Dawkins. Just find me a single example of circular reasoning that I believe in, demonstrate that it really is circular reasoning, and I will instantly stop believing it. And I will thank you for showing me an error in my reasoning.

    Have fun with that one.

    Second: What the hell does this bullshit have to do with atheism anyway? I was an atheist before I knew anything at all about evolution. So please just lay off the silly appeal to motives fallacy. It’s pathetic to see how often this crap is brought up.

    The design claim is limited but it is honest about its limitation. Evolutionary claims that we understand the cause of the diversity of life are not honest.

    Thank you for these unsubstantiated opinions.

  15. Mung: We can take any class of animals and find similar high-tech systems working flawlessly. We don’t see half-wings and transitional forms, but completed technologies working at a very high level. Whenever we see that kind of performance in technologies we observed coming into being, we know they were produced by intelligent causes. Intelligent design seeks to consistently apply that principle uniformly in science

    Cool Bird Tricks — The Longitude Problem, High-Flying Ducks, and More

    So take that keiths!

    Thanks for that link Mung. Goes in the list of things ID-proponents say about how great optimal flawless very high level performance entities are evidence of ID.

    The traditional ID rationalization that because the “designs” work very well, then oh gee they must have been designed. Somehow the ingenuity and high performance, the “flawless” functionality is evidence of design. Except when it’s pointed out how some organismal feature is far from optimal or flawless, then oh gee who ever thought optimality/flawlessness/high performance was evidence for ID? It’s not like Jonathan Wells wrote a whole book called The Myth of Junk DNA.

    So when evolutionists point out some structure or entity is far from optimal, as evidence against intelligent design, they’re attacking a strawman right Mung? Will you be writing to correct Denyse on ENW?

  17. Rumraket,

    I don’t need to know the level of evidence you demand in every other area of your life. The fact that I can show even a single instance of differering standards on these two subjects is enough to prove the accusation of hypocricy.

    If you don’t want to believe in evolution, then fine, don’t. But if you also wish to STOP being the hypocrite that you are, you should ALSO stop believing in the design you clearly believe in. Because THAT explanation fails EVEN MORE than you think evolution does.

    I think this paragraph highlights the disconnect. I think that evolution and design are two arguments with strength and weaknesses. I don’t believe either one is a detailed explanation of how the diversity of life arose.

  21. I am less impressed by the “what good is half a wing” than by “What good is half a Chloroplast?”

    Complex biochemical cycles appear to my jaundiced eye to present greater hurdles to evolutionary explanation and present better candidates for “Irreducible Complexity” than overt morphology.

    I seem to remember an article by Carl Zimmer along the lines that we are seeing with Bacterial Eyes. I thank any in advance if they can locate it for me. In any case, bacterial opsins were the precursors of modern eyes.

    There are different versions of so-called “Purple” Prokaryotes – some Bacteria and some Archaea. There is evidence that the earliest Eubacteria were thermophilic and lived near hydrothermal systems. Consequently bacteriochlorophyll may have evolved as a mechanism of finding and staying close to their hydrothermal source of nutrition. The evolution of Bacterioprodopsin in Archaea would have similar explanations.

    The notion of a thermotrophic Chlorophyll exaptation preceding photophosphorylation to explain Chlorophyll function is an intellectually pleasing in evolutionary terms.

    The notion that “photosynthesis” is NOT “irreducibly complex” in terms often posed by “intelligent design” is also intellectually pleasing in evolutionary terms.

    Continuing in evolutionary terms: Photophosphorylation preceded Photoreduction. Both can operate independently as stand-alone operations in various “prokaryotic” species. Meanwhile, Photophosphorylation and Photoreduction can be uncoupled in the “regular” photosynthesis we study in “higher” plants. So, neither Chloroplasts nor the Biochemical details of Photosynthesis are indeed viable candidates for Irreducible Complexity or Intelligent Design.

  22. TomMueller: So, neither Chloroplasts nor the Biochemical details of Photosynthesis are indeed viable candidates for Irreducible Complexity or Intelligent Design.

    I never saw that coming. Pigment me devastated. 🙂

    Do we have an evolutionary explanation yet for ATP?

  24. TomMueller: The first versions of “Life” employed “primitive” and readily available analogues of ATP, to wit: acetyl phosphate and pyrophosphate

    I wonder what design says. Mung? What’s the design “explanation” for ATP.

    Oh, wait, I think I know this one. It was designed?

  25. We’re more than 170 comments into this thread, and still keiths can’t defend his own OP.

  28. keiths, where are you? It is your OP, so why won’t you defend the claims made in the video that you posted?

    #YouTubeBluff

  30. I am so stinging again. 🙂

    But that fails to explain why keiths is avoiding defending the claims made in the video he posted in his OP. Perhaps he doesn’t agree with those claims.

    So why did he post a video that makes those claims? He won’t say.

    I am so stinging due to his failure to respond. 🙂

Leave a Reply