Magic embryology: placenta maintains symmetry (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, September 20, 2018, 12:12 (2045 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I have repeatedly told you, that devote Darwinists have said if DNA is not junk Darwinism is dead. Their point is chance is proven by the appearance of junk which is discarded DNA due to changes as a result of natural selection. Junk, in their view, shows helter-skelter development. Perhaps they will come to accept your logic, which is not theirs.

dhw: I know what they say. I do wish you would respond to my logic and not to theirs.

DAVID: Your logic implies natural selection has power which I think does not exist. Junk implies chance evolution very directly, a point they must defend. If chance disappears, what is left? If you read their papers you would understand.

My argument does not attribute any power whatsoever to natural selection. Natural selection simply means that it is natural for useful things to survive and useless things not to survive. Therefore if there is no junk, this clearly means that whatever has survived is useful and what is useless has not survived. It’s self-evident, and it presents no problem to Darwinism.

TONY: We would of course point to the fact that the complexity is irreducible, unless of course you can show an evolutionary pathway that could conceivably lead to that mechanism, which I can not see. Not to say it doesn't exist, but the complexity in terms of timing and chemical messaging necessary is staggering.

dhw: The complexity is indeed staggering, as is that of the single cell, but the argument that it is irreducible is not a fact. It is a theory. Behe believes it, and lots of other scientists do not. I personally am not in any position to trace an evolutionary pathway from the single cell (which you agree was the first form of material life) to all the complexities of us humans. Nor, I suspect, are you in a position to trace a pathway from pure energy to conscious energy to the spawning of its spirit son to the spawning of more spirits to the spawning of material cells to the spawning of every innovation in the history of material life. However, I can imagine that over the course of 3.8 billion years, cells used their possibly God-given intelligence to cooperate in forming increasingly complex organs and organisms.

DAVID: Yes, imagine what is not logical. It is too complex as Tony describes.

Firstly, I was correcting Tony: irreducible complexity is a theory not a fact. Nobody knows how all these complexities arose, and the argument that we cannot “show” an evolutionary pathway from one organ or organism to another can be applied to any theory: e.g. you cannot “show” an unknown sourceless power designing every single complexity. We ONLY have theories. May I ask if you find Tony’s “spawning” theory logical?