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 The site is no longer maintained, but the language persists.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.
This question shows that you are thinking in terms of Newtonian time and space. Minds are not physical objects.
In my opinion all life consist of three aspects, body, soul and spirit each with their individual laws. The shared knowledge demonstrated by animals occurs by virtue of the group soul. Animals share a higher form of knowledge that is difficult to explain in physical terms. Certain migratory habits spring to mind. A more specific example of animal abilities is that of the Japanese quail
How could she know this?
Also it is striking how certain flatfish can change the colour and pattern of their upper surface to match that of the seafloor on which they are lying.
What do you mean by group transmittion?
What is there to defend. You declared it a non sequitur. And so in line with your depth of argumentation I suppose I could have replied, No it isn’t!
If Talbott’s argument is a non sequitur then in your opinion the same should apply to the Barbara McClintock quote I gave above.
What are they then and how do you know?
Possibly, but what is a group soul and what evidence is there that it is more than CharlieM’s imagination (vivid though that is, I admit)?
CharlieM,
I was only joking! I appreciate what I write being read.
Corneel,
Science is a business which has to make priorities. A tool that helps with this is extremely valuable unless you are into playing in the sandbox. Biology got a hare ahead of it self for the last 160 years. ID has been very valuable in pointing this out.
Declaring it so don’t make it so. But more than that, whatever minds are made of, their actions have physical consequences. So I don’t think a demand for causality at some point in the chain is inappropriate. Somehow, the mind of Bird X causes it to utter the same call as Bird Y, or build a similar nest or whatever. You reject (arbitrarily IMO) the possibility that their common activity derives from common genetics. So you appeal to something that sounds like telepathy.
Does migration provide a benefit to the organisms that do it, such that they pass on their genes more often than historic lineages that did not? If so, there is at least the potential fof a ‘Darwinian’ explanation. You seem to be drawing quite a sharp dichotomy between ‘behaviours’ and all other aspects of a species held in common: NO behaviour is genetic, so a brand new cause needs inventing.
How far down does this prejudice reach? Earthworms? Flatworms? Nematodes?
Does this capacity increase the chances of the genes of those that exhibit the behaviour to be passed on?
The mechanism by which a trait becomes shared by a clade. Common genetic descent is the usual one. You reject that (sometimes), so must mean something else. How does it work?
The Intelligent Design movement is a religiously motivated political one, not a scientific one. ID has contributed absolutely nothing to scientific knowledge in its brief lie-filled existence.
So, you are precisely illustrating the uselessness of scattering the words of others about like scripture. If I can’t critique it, you can’t defend it, and Talbott isn’t here …
Talbott says something you like: ‘it’s a system not just genes’. But it gains weight (you presumably imagine) if an authority says it (even if that authority is not a biologist). But the longer quote doesn’t support the conclusion. Being a system or not does not depend on the synapomorphies of certain genes in social insects. That’s why it’s a non sequitur. I can’t really flesh that out. But if you declared ‘no it isn’t’, you would need to explain why being a system is a conclusion following on from the synapomorphy question. It’s not just rehashing the Monty Python sketch.
All science or just the parts that conflict with your religious beliefs?
The quail situation, incidentally, is reminiscent of that in the cuckoo, where a strong correlation exists between egg patterning/shape/size and location, for the same reason – camouflage. Parasitisic birds often parasitise several different hosts, but different strains favour those hosts whose eggs are most closely mimicked.
A naive genetic explanation in both cases would be that there is coevolution between the patterning genes and the behavioural – an interesting bridge across the imagined boundary between behavioural and non-behavioural characters.
Pattern A is more beneficial in the presence of Behaviour A. Ditto for B. The result is a nonrandom association between pattern and behaviour. Plus 1 for gene centrism! ***
It’s not proof, but the alternative would have the female access ‘subgroup memory’ in some unexplained way, with ‘subgroup memory’ having some idea what her eggs look like.
*** Additionally, this is only possible in organisms where the female is the heterogametic sex – in birds, unlike us, it’s the males that have the identical sex chromosomes. Thus, while a male will mate with any old female (and vice versa), regardless where they grew up, consistent inheritance of a nonrecombining female-only chromosome allows consistent retention of the host-pattern association. It’s the genes that determine the pattern and the preferred host. The whole reflected in the parts 😁
Yep, my first guess was also cosegregation of the egg colouration with the behavioural preference, though I didn’t bother checking it. I don’t think this necessarily requires physical linkage on the W-chromosome; any assortative mating pattern will also encourage gametic phase disequilibrium. That is, the females need only mate with the “right” males, e.g. because they live in the same region or do mate selection on some visible trait.
Just thinking out loud. I don’t know what the actual case is in Japanese quail.
Since I don’t share your opinion that biology “got a hare ahead of itself” my verdict on the value of ID differs somewhat.
But the more interesting thing here is your confession that the only output of ID has been antagonizing evolutionary biology. Would you agree that Gregory’s idea of a revamped ID that actively researches organismal Design and its Designer will never be?
colewd has already indicated that he believes the origin of life should not be investigated further since the bible already ‘explains’ it.
I asked colwed what other research should be halted due to answers in the bible but for some reason he’s not answered yet.
colwed, what else should we not investigate and instead accept the answers given in the bible instead?
Sure, Bill Cole’s motivations for supporting ID are perfectly clear.
But if he is afraid of scientific progress and wishes to shut it down, why insist that ID is a scientific enterprise? Or if he views natural sciences as a means to learn more about the works of God, like the natural theologians of the 19th century did, why doesn’t he like the idea of Design research? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Maybe we can come to a mutual understanding of what is meant by ‘gene’
To accept the genome as the source of the form and structure of an organism I would have to understand it to be, not just an arrangement of physical parts, but an active dynamic process. Its spacial aspect is subordinate to its time aspect. To get the full picture it has to be understood as a time being.
The human genome project was never going to give us much of an understanding of the genome because what it produced was a dead image, a single.static, frozen,view of something that can only be understood through its movements and interactions. Mapping the DNA misses its most important aspect, the time element.
By all means give the genes their due. But only if you understand them as more than just strings of DNA. If you want to define genes as strings of nucleotides then post-splicing messenger RNA has as much right to be called a gene as the DNA.
No.I am trying to highlight the living processes within cells and considering all the activity that has to occur to procure and arrange the variety of substances required for functionality and so that the cell can play its role in the higher being to which it belongs..There are many levels of coordinated activity.
I think a better way of putting it is that regulation has a genetic component.
No. I believe that in Darwinian terms,bacteria are just some of the organisms that do outcompete us on a massive scale.
I think that physics does show that the more dense the substance the more likely it is to fossilise. Fossilised bones and shells are far more common than soft tissue fossils. Which do you think appeared first in evolution, relatively soft cell membranes or hard mineral deposits?
Corneel,
Yes. I note that, unlike CharlieM’s BBC site, the authors of the original paper actually put “know” in scare quotes:
newton,
Real testable science does not conflict with religion.
Corneel,
You appear to want to chase windmills. ID is what it is and it has been successful in shutting down phony scientific claims at least among the people I have encountered. It’s a limited argument but a powerful one.
You should look at the work going on at AIG. A tsunami is about to hit evolutionary ideology that makes ID look trivial. There is real science going on in the YEC community. Brace for change 🙂
Science not only contradicts it directly refutes some Fundamentalist religious beliefs, most notably a literal interpretation of Genesis.
You mean ID as a pseudoscience has been successful in shutting down rational thought in scientifically incompetent True Believers like yourself. We know.
LOL! We can hardly wait. 😀
I’m always in for a good laugh
When? Within the month? Year? Decade? Century?
Dare you say?
That’s not in doubt. Any sequence of nucleotides that is found in an organism’s genome can be called a gene.
Who is disagreeing?
Yes and the reasons are well understood. You make statements as if they are somehow profound rather than obvious.
I’m guessing it was cells that had no hard parts. Can you guess why?
Keep us posted, Bill! 😉
Alan Fox,
Here is a starting point.
https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/pdf-versions/arj/v8/mitochondrial-dna-clock-d-loop-results.pdf
colewd,
Ah, Jeanson. Good one, Bill. 😁
That’s not so hard. ID already looks trivial.
Bracing
I guess it is more honest to use “Creator” instead of “Designer”, but apart from that I don’t see what difference it makes.
Unbracing
DNA_Jock,
Nice, you looked at the original paper. I notice the authors did not report whether there was a genetic component to variation in the preference. Another explanation is that the birds simply memorize their eggs from initial breeding attempts and develop some preference based on that. I think I want to see these two mundane explanations disproven before I start considering Charlie’s “higher form of knowledge”, cold-hearted materialist that I am.
You could do that, but that is not the way a gene is commonly understood. Most modern definitions require that it is transcribed to RNA and possibly thereafter translated to a polypeptide to form some functional product.
Yes, here (sorry). Genes are the functional units of the hereditary material. RNA fulfills that role in some viruses, but in most organisms it is the DNA. Charlie appear to struggle with the significance of the transmission of heritable information for evolution.
That depends whether the religion make an incorrect scientific claim based on conflicts with religious dogma , not seeing how you can claim that is not possible.
Or unless you judge “real science” as that which does not conflict with religion .
Does real religion make only testable claims?
I know it’s been done to death, but I don’t think it is a misrepresentation to claim that bacterial flagella are irreducibly complex. They consist of coordinated parts some of which if removed would render the bacterium immobile.
Well, of the top of my head, the most prominent counters to the ID position are from the likes of Kenneth Miller, Mark J. Pallen and Nicholas I. Matzke.
The Flagellum Unspun was written by Miller in response to ID arguments.
And ‘From The Origin of Species to the Origin of bacteria flagella’, by Mark J. Pallen and Nicholas I. Matzke they explain:
It was the ID movement’s championing the flagellum as irreducibly complex that prompted this research. They made some important discoveries in their attempt to refute the position of ID advocates.
I have read other biology papers that comment negatively on ID but I don’t have time at the moment to go hunting for them.
But it is clear that ID has stimulated a lot of thinking about biological evolution and that can’t be a bad thing. I don’t think I would have learned so much about these molecular ‘machines’ if it wasn’t for the ID movement.
We should not be insulting those who oppose our point of view, we should be thanking them. (That is a general comment, it is not directed at you, OMagain).
Quantum mechanice is already there to some extent. It is our thinking that needs to catch up. The implications of quantum mechanics is that there are aspects of the material world that are not governed by time and space as is generally understood.
We have come to understand the laws of perspective when it comes to space. We understand that in reality the moon and the disc I hold up to it are not the same diameter. Likewise, regarding time there are also laws of perspective.
What about the pernicious political influence of Darwinism? A Darwinian extremist might argue that not vaccinating against a disease is a good thing because it will eliminate the weak members of the group..
Yeah, right, because noting that the bacteria flagellum can’t move if you chop off it’s flagellum is such a groundbreaking discovery!
Hilarious.
Here in the Netherlands, a major group that refuses to have their children vaccinated are anthroposophists. Is this really the direction you want this argument to go?
In my opinion the nucleus is the physical focus of the life (etheric) principle in eukaryotes. In transplanting the nucleus the life force is also transplanted.
Plants are good examples of living beings in which the life force is dominant. Cuttings can be transplanted and will thrive. Higher animals have sacrificed this vitality in becoming conscious. Nervous systems have very poor regenerative powers compared to the green tissue of plants.
Ah, Nathaniel Jeanson’s cherry-picked stupidity about MtDNA which you just saw completely destroyed over at PS. But you’re Bill Cole with the memory span of a turnip so you thought you’d revisit Jeanson’s idiocy here. 😀
Canids are a very plastic group with a wide range of potential forms within it.
Who said anything about them being humanoid? Technical advancement would be a shared attribute.
I didn’t want to narrow the definition too much. Obviously, there are DNA sequences that encode specific proteins but there’s a considerable portion of the genome where we cannot yet connect genotype to phenotype.
Well, I don’t think we give away the farm in acknowledging that RNA virus genes are made of RNA. It’s a clue (in my view) that RNA world isn’t idle speculation.
What makes one group plastic with a wide range of forms?