This offers the simplest “neutral” colloquial mixture of “design” and “evolution” that I’ve seen in a long time. The site is no longer maintained, but the language persists.
“As a designer it is important to understand where design came from, how it developed, and who shaped its evolution. The more exposure you have to past, current and future design trends, styles and designers, the larger your problem-solving toolkit. The larger your toolkit, the more effective of a designer you can be.” http://www.designishistory.com/this-site/
Here, the term “evolution” as used just meant “history”. The author was not indicating “design theory evolution”, but rather instead the “history of designs” themselves, which have been already instantiated.
The topic “design is history” nevertheless enables an obvious point of contact between “evolution” and “design”. They both have histories that can be studied. Present in the above meaning of “design” are the origin, processes and agent(s) involved in the “designing”. This differs significantly from the Discovery Institute’s version of “design theory”, when it comes to history, aim, structure and agency, since the DI’s version flat out avoids discussion of design processes and agent(s). The primary purpose of the DI’s “design theory”, meanwhile, is USAmerican religious apologetics and “theistic science”.
The quotation above likely didn’t come from an IDist, and it isn’t referencing “Intelligent Design” theory as a supposed “scientific theory”. The “designer” in the quotation above is a (more or less intelligent) human designer, not a Divine Designer. This fact distinguishes it “in principle” from the Discovery Institute’s ID theory, which is supposed to be (depends on who you’re speaking with in the IDM) about first biology, then informatics, and statistics. The DI’s ID theory is not actually focused on “designing by real designers”, but rather on apologetics using “design” and informational probabilism.
The Discovery Institute’s failure to distinguish or even highlight the differences and similarities between human design and Divine Design, and instead their engagement in active distortion, equivocation, double-talking, and obfuscation between them, are marks of its eventual downward trend to collapse.
Moved a comment of phoodoo’s to guano and a comment quoting it. I’ve pm’d phoodoo.
That’s not what Allan said. Scrolls can be copied and texts will survive, despite the originals rotting away. Break the chain of copying and the information is lost forever.
Yawn, phoodoo.
DNA_Jock,
What? It’s a good movie.
The takeaway from it is they DON’T use batting average as a metric for the best batting average.
Not really. A gene, these days, is generally considered to be the nucleic acid sequence associated with a particular trait.
Indeed no they don’t. That’s what I’m saying gene centrism is NOT saying, but you seem obsessively determined to reiterate the point ad nauseam, as if it matters. Gene centrism would not be valid solely in a system where the genes themselves ‘did’ everything directly, with no intermediate level of action.
It’s not a binary. All stretches of nucleic acid are ultimately ‘acted upon’ by at least one other, if only DNA polymerase, and some also act (via an RNA or protein intermediary) on others – for example the aforementioned DNA polymerase.
DNA polymerase itself is a protein produced from a gene by the actions of RNA polymerase, the ribosome, tRNA and amino acyl tRNA synthetases. All of these are gene products: the genome ‘acting upon’ other parts of the genome but also, in respect of expression of the above-named enzymes, acting upon itself. They are products, not primary actors.
Which ultimately roots in the genome, not the cytoplasm. To the extent genes are ‘acted upon’, they are acted upon by gene products. This is not an argument against gene centrism, however often you repeat it. Give people some credit. They do understand biology.
Big hairy deal. You do realise this is a list of things gene centrism is NOT saying?
Somewhat. But the things common to all members of a species, including those environmentally triggered, are likely genetically encoded. You suffer from all-or-nothing thinking. If you can find an exception to something, you seem to think it applies to everything.
A semantic irrelevance. A passive entity could still be part of a deterministic system; determinism is not defeated by reversing the flow. But determinism is still not a corollary of gene centrism. An example of the kind of strawman nonsense one hears is the idea that genes make you ride your bike.
Here’s the thing: forget physiology. While it is the case that physiology has its ultimate basis in genetics, despite your objections, if you don’t buy that – if you see the involvement of enzymes in gene expression as somehow fatal to ‘physiological gene-centrism’ – then fine. You’re wrong, but fine. But gene centrism is not a physiological stance. It is an evolutionary stance.
However activity is manifest, whether ‘acted upon’ or ‘acting’, if a stretch of nucleic acid is correlated with the success or otherwise of its bearers, vs those of alleles, then that allele will increase or decrease in the population. That is what gene centrism is fundamentally saying.
“But genes never appear naked”, croaks a small voice ….
A spectacular piece of point-missing.
Ah, verbal models. To be frank, that looks like an extremely shallow similarity to me. Also, I am not aware of any instances where the creationist “model” has been “implemented” in any meaningful sense of the word.
Do you understand why I had to smile reading this sentence?
Anyway, design history: the why, how, when, where and whodunnit of ID theory. How useful would that be?
What other areas of science should we give up on and accept the ‘answers’ provided in the bible, colwed?
I believe that is the consequence of a mutation in the WHOOSH gene.
Proteins are fundamental to all life. Stretches of DNA are transcribed and translated into amino acid chains. Organisms use these chains to assemble the protein complexes required for their growth, and survival. These chains are moved around and manipulated in a variety of ways to suit particular needs. There are many similarities in DNA sequences between the various life forms because we are all basically made of the same ‘stuff’ arranged in various ways. This is pretty basic so I can’t see why anyone would argue with this.
What I would argue about is the creativity attributed to what is seen as copying errors. A certain amount of tolerance is built in to the replication system. Any engineer will tell you that ranges of tolerance are built in to systems as required. This sloppiness is not an error, it is wise design. I know from experience how too much rigidity and lack of tolerance can be detrimental to correct function.
In my opinion mutations are a feature of the necessary variability built in to the process of evolution. But they do not play a large part in the progress of evolution towards organisms with more advanced forms of individual consciousness.
Quantum mechanics tells us that entities at the molecular level have behaviours which are very different from some diffuse cloud of matter in space being ‘wibbly’ round the edges. Imagining matter in space in this way is to take the world of our experience and transferring it to the quantum realm. This is inappropriate at the atomic level. At this level it is meaningless to talk of matter in this way because there is no such matter as we know it. That type of Newtonian thinking has been superseded.
Corneel,
I wonder if these were the discussions right before the fall of the Roman Empire 🙂
Its all there and documented and available on your computer. It starts with Genesis 1. Here is the beginning of a video series to get you started.
A holistic idealist approach does not need to posit a building up of parts from simple beginnings to create the first life forms. When humans create complex items the parts are constructed and assembled with the whole complete item already present in the mind. There is no need for accidental coming together of parts.
Conventional natural science takes it for granted that matter precedes mind. I believe the opposite.
The whole reflected in the parts 🙂
All of modern life. But still, their sequences reside in DNA.
The question is whether that commonality is commonly descended or not. If commonly descended, you’ve got it the wrong way round – in that case, it’s not that organisms happen to have similar DNA because they are morphologically similar, but they are morphologically similar because they have similar DNA through common ancestry. So what I would argue with is your attribution of fundamental cause of morphological similarity.
I’ve already covered this. You didn’t address it last time and I can’t be arsed repeating the whole thing again, but basically replication and error correction’s infidelity is not ‘built-in tolerance’. The system is faithful enough to succeed enough; there is diminished reward and capacity for improvement. Prokaryotes make 10x the errors of eukaryotes. Was their engineer more tolerant?
You both insist that mutations result from ‘wise design’ and that they are trivial in effect. That’s quite some doublethink.
I predict that until humanity wakes up and treats the earth as a living being that can only take so much abuse and poisoning, instead of as a never ending supply of resources to be exploited, we will kill the living planet. A living being can only survive if its parts are all playing their role by cooperating in maintaining the whole. Nature has produced a portion of herself which has been given the responsibility to make choices about her future. The outcome is not pre-determined.
Some individuals abuse their bodies, humanity as a whole has been abusing the planet. The whole reflected in the parts.
Yeah, I’d take lessons in physics who thinks that Life once wasn’t ‘condensed’ enough, in an Einsteinian manner, to fossilise. 🤣
The ‘wibbliness’ of molecules affects, among other things, replication accuracy. That’s your ‘wise design’ feature: something unavoidable at the level the design operates.
They have the advantage of dealing with material which does not react when components are bolted together. You invoke quantum physics on the one hand but display no idea how physics works at the molecular level on the other. You can’t just shuffle atoms round with the power off.
This is a common ID misconception. Neither do I. But there is a world between ‘accident’ and ‘intent’.
Bully for you. So how does that work? Given that all known minds have a physical substrate, and construction begins with opposable thumbs, how does your Magic, disembodied Mind actually implement its conceptions?
Oh, if you like that slogan, you’ll love gene centrism …
They sound more profound in the original Latin.
*from someone who*, dagnabbit! Trying to type while the kids take the piss out of me for doing what I rag them about …
I think I might be missing some reference here.
I read the whole thing once, but I do not recall reading about the design principles of adaptations like flight and sight, nor the origin of complex molecular machines described in there.
How do we find out? Science, Bill. Learning new stuff, you know!
What are minds made of?
I think it is similar to “rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic”. Could be wrong.
Why would it be of any concern to a group of chemicals whether or not they were copied accurately? Do mineral crystals care if they grow into perfect regular solids? Do they try to avoid degradation or distortion of their growth patterns? What gives living substance the additional feature of self preservation?
The wonder is that physical substances have the characteristics that enable them to build such complex structures and to perform such functions. It is as though the molecular properties of the basic chemicals found on earth were destined to be able to interact in ways that would not only produce living tissues but to also speed up the processes in some cases by several orders of magnitude?
RNA is a good example of a living, active molecule which is present in every form of life on the planet.
The problem with analogies is that they can be taken too far.
In the case of nucleic acid, this feature is provided by semiconservative replication. By its very nature, this gives exponential growth in ideal conditions. When that growth is constrained, the conditions for a Darwinian competition between variants is enabled. This doesn’t directly explain origin, but does provide an impetus for tuning copying fidelity – to the extent that a particular degree is advantageous, or optimal, compared to rivals, it will tend to increase.
RNA is active but DNA of exactly the same sequence and only minor chemical distinction is ‘passive’? Hmmm … 🤔
Isn’t it just.
And this shows just how limited our freedom is at this time. Evolution has a very extensive future.
Maybe so, maybe not. That is hardly relevant to the present and its past.
(eta – my sexuality is a source of considerable pleasure, for many reasons both direct and indirect. I’d be sorry to lose it, along with sight, hearing and the pleasure of eating and drinking, in the progression to disembodiment).
And we can still a reflection of this progress in our development as individuals. We go through a plant like phase as the embryo implants in the uterine wall. The embryo grows in the mother as a plant grows in Mother Earth. The whole reflected in the parts.
As long as we remain earthly beings we necessarily go through this plant like stage.
The only publishing I am intending to do is such as I do here. I am not a scientist let alone a specialist of any sort. Participating in places like this gives me all the feedback and inspiration I need. I’ll leave formal publishing to the experts.
In my opinion it is not a question of fitting design into evolution, nor evolution into design. It is more a question of observation and trying to make sense of what we observe. You only have to look at the range of human inventions and designs that have been copied from nature, both consciously and unconsciously, to marvel at the way evolution has produced living beings that are able to use and manipulate the forces of nature to their benefit.
Allan, can’t you see?
DNA is an extreme case. It doesn’t share the same passion for catalyzing reactions as other nucleic acids.
I don’t exclude natural selection. It is an observable process.
In the da Vinci analogy natural selection is equivalent to the adjustments he made during the course of completing the painting. Adjustment that were necessary to bring the details back into line with how he had envisioned it.
But the painting is not completed and never will be. And if you keep adding “adjustments” the process is indistinguishable from painting.
I remember you gave spikelets in maize as an example. But a change in the number of spikelets could hardly be classed as novel features.
And the ears of modern maize compared to teosinthe are just as predicted by Goethe. Both are indivual expressions of the archetype, the former taken to the extreme. Just as many dog breeds are extreme forms of canid.
As I see it the ability to fly is at the level of the individual, the passion for flying is at the level of the group.
It comes from observation. Any forms of active life in evidence are whole beings. A single celled zygote is a whole functioning being. A prokaryote is a whole functioning being. We have no evidence whatsoever of replicating life ever having existed without some sort of membrane within which the complex processes of replication can take place.
In the beginning was the cell or alternatively in the beginning was speculation.
But do we have evidence of minds before matter?
Corneel,
We could try to learn about the origin of sub atomic particles but that would be getting ahead of ourselves until we understand subatomic particles themselves. Lets understand biology first and use evidence of design as a signal that we are dealing with an origin event which maybe difficult to access given our location in the matrix. 🙂
And we have moved well beyond one gene, one trait. One gene may have various uses and most traits rely on the timed expression of many genes. The way that genes are used cannot be ignored. A lot of coordination is required in both space and time.
Possibly, but what are minds made of?
Not of primordial life, it doesn’t. “In the beginning …” indeed.
We have no evidence whatsoever of disembodied minds. At a bit of an impasse then, aren’t we? 🤔
“In the beginning was the cell” is itself speculation.
😁
It has a go, though. Dilettante substance that it is.
It absolutely can be ignored when talking of molecular phylogeny, which I believe I was (hard to be sure without wading back a week; it’s getting a bit like that Two Ronnies Mastermind sketch.)
All orchestrated by other gene products, ie, ultimately, by the genome. Which is the sensible way to do it, since the genome passes undiluted from cell to cell, and ultimately sources everything else.
If you insist on relying on “observation”, I recommend that you stop blinding yourself to inconvenient facts. The change was in the arrangement of spikelets, not their number. The spikelets appear in pairs in maize, which is a bona fide novel morphological feature as it is not observed in teosinte.
Relevant quote:
What is “extreme form” but a thinly veiled attempt to avoid the word “new”?
“Look at my new car”
“Bah, it’s just an extreme form of your previous car”
Can’t you see how you warp the meaning of words until novel forms no longer qualify as such?
Bats versus other mammals?
Nonono, let me guess. Extreme case, right?
ETA: perhaps you should also define “group”. I have a hunch that it is going to be fitted retroactively to match your story.
Well, we wouldn’t want that, right?
You seemed to have left out the part where you explain how we gain understanding and learn something new. Want to try again? Perhaps this time a little bit less eager to reach the conclusion you want?
I apologise for trailing behind in these conversations, but given the time I have available to spend here I cannot keep up without ignoring many of the posts that are relies to my comments.
So in order to give proper due to those that are arguing with what I have said I must necessarily go at my own pace. But I don’t think it is always a bad thing for posters to look back and review what they have said a day or two after it was written. If this is too much trouble then you can just ignore what I write.
Anyway you lot carry on and I’ll catch up if and when I can 🙂 Now where was I?…
I don’t just dismiss genetics. Regarding the genome, I think Barbara McClintock said it well in 1984 with these fanous lines:
Ever more sophisticated tools are being developed that give us a depth of detail barely imagined not so long ago. Now cooperative interconnected networks are being revealed and linear causal trails are losing their hold on our imagination.