Back to irreducible complexity (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 29, 2010, 17:25 (5208 days ago) @ David Turell

PART ONE-David has referred us to several eye-opening articles. The horizontal transfer of genes theory is particularly interesting (How DNA Might Have Developed), especially as Mark Buchanan says there's evidence of it in species that include a frog, lizard, mouse and bushbaby. Could you explain how this process takes place physically?-The James A. Shapiro post is by far the most stimulating, and I'll return to it in a moment, but first let's deal with the "theistic philosopher" Cornelius Hunter. The science is revealing, but the conclusions in his various articles (my quotes are from different ones) seem to me extremely simplistic and even contradictory. He reproduces Antony Flew's garden parable, and uses it to ridicule the "religious beliefs" of the blindly faithful evolutionist to show that there is NO gardener (i.e. evolution is wrong). He doesn't seem to realize that the parable applies equally to his own religious beliefs, and actually finishes this article by saying: "One way or another, there IS a gardener" (my capitals). Orwell would have called this "doublethink". -Hunter rightly, in my view, castigates those evolutionists who believe that "evolution creates the mechanism that evolution requires to work". We've discussed this at length ourselves: evolution and abiogenesis are two different theories. But he uses this to dismiss evolution itself as "a truly silly idea". Is evolution silly just because we don't know what created the mechanisms that set it in motion? In that case, he might as well dismiss his idea that God created the world, since we don't know what created God (Dawkins' favourite non-sequitur). Darwin himself was careful to make the distinction between evolution and origin: "How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated" (Difficulties on Theory). This is not a matter of "turning a blind eye". We don't need to know the origin to believe in the process. Hunter must know perfectly well that not all evolutionists are atheists, and not all evolutionists ascribe the mechanisms to "serendipity". As for evolutionists failing to deliver evidence, even if we know the word is highly adaptable, I don't think I'd be the only one to regard this as a much better example of "turning a blind eye".-Finally, he attempts an aphorism: "Religion drives science, and it matters". An atheist might with equal absurdity claim that atheism drives science. What drives science should be science. And so it is with a sigh of relief that I turn to James A. Shapiro. (See PART TWO.)