REVISE THIS:Two sides of the irreducible complexity argument (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, September 17, 2009, 20:27 (5342 days ago) @ David Turell

In Behe's case his algebraic error results in an error of 65 orders of magnitude; it makes his own result less likely. It was on his argument about bacterial flagellum, and it was the key equation of the whole book. Since "Darwin's Black Box" has been in print, this errata has been presented to him in numerous extrememly public events such as college campus debates. He has yet to fix the error. Scientists--when doing their job properly--fix errors when they are brought to their attention. Behe doesn't, therefore he's not a scientist. 
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> Where is this 10^65 error? It is not in Darwin's Black Box in the flagellum section nor any other page I can find.-Ah, that's because the book I was referring to was "No Free Lunch," written by again, Dembski. (The error is on page 297, and if you remember basic algebra you'll find it very quickly. Sad when a man with no degree can do math better than a PhD in mathematics.) -Grabbed from random biochemist on Behe:-"Behe used a calculation to try to show that a protein like trypsin (which is a protein in your intestines and helps you digest food) could never evolve through natural selection. Trypsin contains a specific kind of bond (called a disulfide bond) that stabilizes the structure of the protein; if this bond isn't formed then the protein doesn't work. Behe decided he'd try to predict the probability of a disulfide forming throughout natural selection. His calculation requires that the protein form a disulfide only at one certain position in the protein's structure, which was his first scientific error. A disulfide bond can form not just in one specific place in the protein for it to stabilize the protein, as Behe presumes in his calculation. Additionally, a protein doesn't necessarily need a disulfide bond to be stable, there are many other mechanisms to stabilize a protein than Behe considers in his calculations. When you factor these 2 caveats into the equations, then natural selection suddenly becomes much, much more attractive as a model for biological change than Behe claims. This is merely a simple criticism of Behe's work; there are also many other, more complicated problems with his work that I won't go into here. "-(I had to pick an argument that I could understand better with my minimal background in organic chemistry.) Behe makes too many assumptions, and we all know what that does. If you pick only one way to form the molecule, the odds are against it. If you loosen your restrictions to other reactions that give similar but not identical results, you have an easier game. You always seem to ask the question "what are the odds that we got to this exact point," but both you and Behe seem to ignore the chain of causation that lead to whatever event you want to study. The odds of a man appearing from thin air is low, but the odds of an amino acid forming in a pool is pretty high. Could we have been seeded from some other means, maybe even an alien race as Dembski suggests? Helluva lot more believable than a mystical driving force.-Why do I think natural selection is sufficient? Changes accumulate in all organisms over time; this is documented fact. But if there's no need to forcibly evolve, why do it? Nature has shown us that it is fairly economical, at least in regards to systems such as the krebs' cycle. The same creationist argument applies to design as it does to evolution: If design is true, we should be able to see macro-evolution happen very rapidly, or we should be able to induce it. However neither of these things has been observed; lots and lots of micro, never any macro. This suggests that evolution is a more passive process that does its job only when it MUST. -For your idea of RNA pushing change, this makes alot of sense when you consider that stress hormones do alot of things to the body, like decrease life expectancy. It makes complete sense that when you're stressed, mutations occur--which would be your epigenetics. Are these changes passed on? If they make to the sex cells, of course they are. [EDIT] And that's the definition of natural selection. [EDIT] But that's not what your question is; your question is about what drives speciation, not evolution. That is a much more abstract question.-EDITED

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