Two sides of the irreducible complexity argument: dhw Pt1 (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, September 20, 2009, 00:19 (5340 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:
Matt: If there's no need to forcibly evolve, why do it? [...] 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.-I'm not at all sure if I've followed your argument throughout this paragraph, so my apologies if I've misunderstood it. That first question is a haunting one. The simple forms of life have proved durably successful, and so they clearly didn't need to evolve. We therefore have to go back to the usual theory of beneficial chance mutations, which were not needed, but conveyed an advantage. Every single organ, faculty, sense which separates us by such a vast gulf from those earliest forms of life would then have come into being initially by pure chance. David has, for instance, asked the provocative question: How Did Sex Pop Up? Bearing in mind that it takes two to tango, and that if those two are to reproduce they will normally have to be male and female, the idea of simultaneous chance mutations puts a mighty strain on one's credulity.-According to conventional evolutionary theory, even though mutations happen at all times in all organisms, the appearance of new organisms only arrives through "need," or in other words, some environmental attribute outside the organism's control starts putting pressure on it, either through predation or through destruction of its habitat by means of any natural phenomenon; sometimes just through moving away from the core group and adapting to a slightly different habitat. Those that manage to survive due to a genetically-linked trait have been "selected," and get to continue on. So that's what I mean that evolution only seems to happen when it has to. It is this particular segment of evolution that David (and you?) seem to be at odds with, and I think I understand why. Technically, if we are collecting and disseminating mutations and passing them along--isn't THAT evolution too? And if it is, is it the random environmental processes that is doing the work? I would say that the design view is looking "inside" the organism whereas the traditional theory is looking "outside." The major obstacle for the design argument is that if it is true, than the event of macroevolution (drastic shift from one body form to another) should be viewable, or at the least, we should be able to induce it at will without needing a corresponding environmental shift. -The answer for your ancient organisms; not all populations would have had to evolve, if the conditions stayed relatively stable. In our primordial soup, it covered the globe, and conditions were going to be different at the poles, for example, than at the equator. There would be a selective difference that would cause a 'NEED' for evolution in these locations. In these instances it wouldn't have been a beneficial mutation that simply "appeared" as you seem to suggest, only that some normal variation (like the changes that make Africans darker-skinned than me) existed that allowed some individuals to survive in a different environment. No one will deny that if I moved to Africa and sat out in the sun naked that I'd probably die, wheras one of my good buddies from Africa (esp. Sudan... holy crap are they dark) would shrug his shoulders. Oh, for the record, I'm nearly as white as my hair is blonde. I'll post a pic sometime...)-The waters get even more cloudy when we add in evolutionary computer sims; in short randomness DOES give rise to ordered structures. (DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying that computer sims provide evidence for or against a creator, only that order can come from chaos without any intervention beyond pressing "play.") -None of this gets us any closer to a final answer, but that's more or less been my position. Materialists see only disorder, immaterialists see design, neither of which leads to any real conclusion about a creator. (My time on this board has only made me more sure about being unsure.)

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"