Inference and its role in NS (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, January 22, 2011, 15:03 (4863 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: I am in agreement that natural selection is generally a passive process. However I think we both might be arguing over semantics. If we agree that natural selection is the filter--then we really only care about what the output of the filter is.
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> This is a new dimension to our discussions: who says the output is the only thing we really care about? You have missed the point of both the theist and the atheist agendas! So let me spell it out for you. The dispute is over whether the complexities of life's physical mechanisms are too great to have arisen by chance. Natural selection is irrelevant to the design argument ... it's a perfectly logical process whereby what survives is that which is most suited to survival (hence your 14 stages of horse). It would be unreasonable to deny this. By making out that evolution and NS are synonymous, the atheist can therefore argue that any questioning of evolution is unreasonable. What Dawkins calls "organized complexity" is not created by NS, but by mechanisms for replication, adaptation and innovation, without which evolution could not take place and Nature would have no variations to select from. These mechanisms have so far proved to be too complex for us to understand, let alone reproduce, and so theists claim that they have been designed. If you reject the possibility of design, you have no choice but to put your faith in the ability of chance to create the mechanisms ... but the idea of "faith in chance" is anathema to your atheist: hence the strategy of trying to make NS (which has no bearing on the design argument) synonymous with evolution. Ah Matt, what happened to my fellow sceptic's scepticism?-The commentary above needs to be repeated over and over. It is the very clearest summary I've seen of the debating points between design and atheism.-That said, the use of the horse example is of especial interest: note that the horse has been bred back down to original size. This means the coding for advancing evolution is present in the final form of an organism, and can be reversed by selective breeding back to the beginning. This suggests to me that an argument can be made that the code for advancing evolution is present from the beginning of evolution, since the morphogenic pattern controls in the genome are fully maintained going forward or backwards.