Intelligent Design

[BadBoy]

You can't trust the consensus. They are all the wrong color. Ask anyone.

Duh, not everyone agrees with that!,

 

[BadBoy]

Perhaps we can assume McCandless was a believer in Intelligent Design, and thought himself capable of all kinds of feats in consequence. If we throw in that line "God will never give me something to do that I'm not up to", that is so popular with the faithful we are on a winner and the thread is back on track.

If only he had slowly evolved and adapted to the situation he found himself getting into, he may have survived.

Actually I have often wondered though never investigated, if human intelligence is becoming a fitness trait (actually maybe that is rather obvious), rather than say straight alpha male brawn. Was watching a couple of mountain goats on an Attenborough program fighting for the right to plug the females, which still happens with humans on a Saturday night around our way. But I can't help feeling that having loads of bunce (money), which generally can be hard to come by without some level of intelligence, will most always win the gal.

 

[Aridas]

No, it was a seeking of clarity, nothing more.

Which is why you responded to the clarification like you did and pointedly omitted the part about what claim it was actually made to address?

There was never an attempt at ripping a position apart,

There was no claim made that you were ripping a position apart. Rather, the closest claim made to that is that you would have had to seize upon a small part of the refutation and rip it out of the context to get to where you (and Fast Eddie B) ended up. The context provided both by the original quotation and the surrounding text should have kept the meaning rather clear, regardless, before getting to your treatment of the clarification. Furthermore, if you weren't going after JoeBentley about how he said what he said, which you weren't, you really shouldn't have been going after me. Frankly, that fact quite strongly hints at what probably was actually going on.

just a seeking of understanding of the poster's point. Not every questioning of someone's post is an attempt to pull the argument down, although some posters do behave as though it is. I still, even now, don't understand why the (trivial) point was made in the way it was.

The only reason I used "exists" in the original was as a mirror to that claim that JoeBentley made, while using it exactly like he did. If you have a problem with the usage, take it up with him, first. Or rather, don't, because he's already effectively admitted that "exists" was a poor choice and restated what he meant in a way that should have been clearer to those who weren't actually paying attention. Still just as wrong for the exact same reasons as I pointed out initially and in my clarification to you, of course, given that his initial stated reasons for why it "didn't exist" had kept what he was referring to clear enough.

Satisfied yet?

 

[Aridas]

I'm sorry I can't afford a full page ad in the New York Times to let the entire world know that you were right and I was wrong. I might be able to get you another trophy and ribbon.

My apologies for the unpleasantness. That wasn't directed at you at all.

I still have literally no clue what exact problem you had with my statement outside of pure semantics and pedantics, but it's obvious you are not only right but IT IS SUPER IMPORTANT.

What do you think was actually right about your claims that people don't believe Intelligent Design is the case? A heck of a lot do, after all. It's even easily demonstrable. Most of them are religious folks, yes, but a notable few who aren't religious also believe in Intelligent Design (can't forget that ID allows for aliens, after all), too. ID is literally rebranded creationism, just modified slightly to be a little bit more inclusive of other potential intelligent designers and specifics for how the design was done and implemented than Biblical versions of creationism. Claiming that no one believes in ID means that you're saying that no one believes in creationism. There's no getting around that.

 

[MikeG]

..........Satisfied yet?

Just cut it out. You're in danger of annoying the hell out of people who want a discussion of the subject "Intelligent Design", whilst doing nothing whatever to address the question I posed. I have literally zero interest in your answer now anyway, (it was never more than an aside), and this stupid nonsense is a classic ISF multi-page "I'm right and you're wrong" ego-fest. You've managed to take a simple "sorry, I don't understand the point you are trying to make" and turn it into 3 days of tedious bollocks. Congratulations.

 

[zooterkin]

Having one extra pair of legs identical to the first ones is the shortest and easiest path. Radically changing the design of legs is a long and difficult journey, if an advantage compared to previous versions needs to be constantly maintained.

Oh, indeed, but it's much easier to adapt a pair of legs you already have into something else, rather than develop that something else from nothing, which is the straw man of evolution that the IDers prefer to attack.

 

[JJM 777]

it's much easier to adapt a pair of legs you already have into something else, rather than develop that something else from nothing

It is easier to slightly modify existing complex structures than build new ones from scratch. On the other hand, if this complex something is useful and necessary in its current form and use, adapting it "into something else" might sometimes be more problematic natural-selection-wise than developing something new while all existing organs do their current necessary job.

Yeah, one-dimensional thinking, or how was it.

 

[Fast Eddie B]

One thing has always concerned me...

Let's say a 4-legged creature has a simple mutation giving an extra pair of legs. Let's further say that an extra pair of legs gives a very slight survival advantage.

But who does this creature mate with? He's a 6-legged island in an ocean of 4-legged creatures. It seems like his advantage would be diluted away in subsequent generations, in a sort of regression to the mean.

And yet it does happen. Maybe it's only the very rare occurrence of a new population being isolated. Or a gene so dominant that only one parent needs to possess the 6-legged gene?

Not debating it does happen that way, it's just always puzzled me a bit.

 

[Oystein]

One thing has always concerned me...

Let's say a 4-legged creature has a simple mutation giving an extra pair of legs. Let's further say that ann extra pair of legs gives a very slight survival advantage.

But who does this creature mate with? He's a 6-legged island in an ocean of 4-legged creatures. It seems like his advantage would be diluted away in subsequent generations, in a sort of regression to the mean.

And yet it does happen. Maybe it's only the very rare occurrence of a new population being isolated. Or a gene so dominant that only one parent needs to possess the 6-legged gene?

Not debating it does happen that way, it's just always puzzled me a bit.

This already puzzled Darwin, who was aware of the Regression to Mean problem - but that was before the discovery of Mendelian genetics and eventually the DNA code. The thing is that mating and mixing does NOT produce intermediate values of genetic information, it's always a discrete thing which either preserves a allel fully or loses it completely. This way, if a gene is favored by selection, it will multiply by a factor larger than 1, with all copies undiminished (unless another mutation occurs), or it disappears. Regression to Mean has little meaning in the discrete world of genes.

Sent from mobile phone through Tapatalk

 

[Tolls]

In addition, the mutation doesn't actually need to provide an advantage (however you want to define that), but just needs to not result in a disadvantage. So "neutral" mutations can build up, and when a crisis hits (ie the environment in which the creature lives changes in some way) one or more of these mutations can come into their own.

At least that's what I thought was one mechanism...I may well be out of date.

 

[Fast Eddie B]

Thanks.

I actually did a project in school on Mendel and his peas.

I was kind of surprised to find that he and Darwin were contemporaries. I had assumed Mendel predated Darwin.

Oystein makes a good point. I think Dawkins makes it in "River Out Of Eden", emphasizing the digital nature of that river.

And we can't forget sexual selection - six legs might just trigger something in the opposite sex. It's even been proposed that bipedalism in primates could have arisen from something as simple a sexual selection. I think Dawkins brings this up in "The Ancestor's Tale".

 

[Spindrift]

It's even been proposed that bipedalism in primates could have arisen from something as simple a sexual selection. I think Dawkins brings this up in "The Ancestor's Tale".

Why is the doggy position so popular?

 

[Peregrinus]

I actually did a project in school on Mendel and his peas.

I was kind of surprised to find that he and Darwin were contemporaries. I had assumed Mendel predated Darwin.

Mendel's paper on hybridization in peas was published in 1866, 7 years after Origin; ironically it was pretty much ignored until the turn of the Century.

 

[korenyx]

The human body is perfect argument is a somewhat flawed argument. I suppose you have pointed out to your cousin some of the flaws in our bodies?

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/04/the-most-unfortunate-design-flaws-in-the-human-body/

Having a common canal for food and respiration is a flaw I am acutely aware of. I was intubated for a month many years back and suffer a bit of damage in that area, so often get something down my trachea. Dolphins have evolved beyond this flaw.

I did point out some of those things and he pulled the "We don't know God's reasons" argument.

 

[Peregrinus]

[H]e pulled the "We don't know God's reasons" argument.

With, I assume, a straight face. Doesn't he realize these threads abound in wide-eyed types claiming there's a book (collection of books) that explicitly delineate "god's reasons"? And it's quite apparent he's never discussed the "perfect human body" with someone who has a modicum of medical expertise.

 

[Thor 2]

I did point out some of those things and he pulled the "We don't know God's reasons" argument.

That argument is the last line of defence for the theist. You have him on the ropes so go for the jugular.

 

[Rincewind]

That argument is the last line of defence for the theist. You have him on the ropes so go for the jugular.

With food and breath simultaneously?

 

[Delvo]

Let's say a 4-legged creature has a simple mutation giving an extra pair of legs... who does this creature mate with? He's a 6-legged island in an ocean of 4-legged creatures... And yet it does happen.

I don't believe that there has been such a case. Different fixed numbers of limbs have arisen from different backgrounds in different cases, but apparently not by changing from earlier fixed numbers.

The easiest case to illustrate is the arthropods. The basic original arthropod plan is essentially a segmented worm with an exoskeleton and a pair of limbs on each segment, and all segments & limbs identical. At this stage, the number of segments, and thus the number of limbs, is not fixed; it varies easily and without any particular consequences. Then the segments & limbs start differentiating and specializing. In all modern arthropods, the first few segments (although not the same number in all lineages) fuse into a head, and the limbs on those segments shrink and reshape into mouth parts. Modern centipedes have mostly stopped at that point, where the number of segments in that first section needs to be right so the head can have the proper structure, but behind that, it doesn't matter exactly how many copies of the generic non-head segments & limbs there are, and they come in a wide range of numbers, varying not just between species but also within them.

But other arthropod lineages tinker with the rest of the body some more. The remaining body segments can fuse into groups like an insect's thorax & abdomen, and separate series of limbs can become specialized for grabbing, walking, swimming, spinning silk, filtering food particles from water, or even breathing, or they can either be suppressed from growing at all, or even grow but be fused in place together to form a new bottom surface of the abdomen. When those differentiations & specializations happen, they happen to specific numbers of segments/limbs, thus locking down the total numbers. So different kinds of arthropods have different numbers of limbs in different sets, but all derived from an earlier state in which the number hadn't been fixed at all yet, rather than by changing from one fixed number to another.

Vertebrates do show some signs of a similar overall path, starting with segmentation and a high degree of repetition of parts and relatively free variation in numbers of copies, followed by differentiation between copies of what was originally the same kind of part, which settles the numbers down to an extent... but just not in our limbs. It shows up in our spines & ribs & associated muscles & nerve structures (more so in fish and snakes than in those of us with big limbs whose development also distorted the torso nearby), and in the repeated arches/loops of our circulatory systems (at least as embryos), and in our pharyngeal/"gill" arches. But no connection between this primitive vertebrate segmentation and limbs is apparent, because all known examples have no limbs at all or just the same few simple arrangements of limbs that seem to have no relationship to the segments of the torso. So again, although we can't tell what made the number what it was in the first place, once that number got set, no more were ever added to it.

That only seems to leave cephalopod tentacles. These are elongations of muscular structures around the mouth, like an elephant's trunk being an elongation of muscles of the nose & upper lip. What starts out as one or two masses (bilateral symmetry) splits into more separate parts soon after elongation begins, like the way the single stump of a growing human embryo's hand splits into five parts which then continue growing independently to form fingers. Sometimes, individual cephalopods have been found in which the number was abnormal because an extra split happened, just like a vertebrate limb with an extra finger/toe. This appears to have minimal effect on tentacle function and essentially none on fertility, but offspring don't inherit it.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I think consensus was that Amanda didn't do it.

 

[Thor 2]

I don't believe that there has been such a case. Different fixed numbers of limbs have arisen from different backgrounds in different cases, but apparently not by changing from earlier fixed numbers.

The easiest case to illustrate is the arthropods. The basic original arthropod plan is essentially a segmented worm with an exoskeleton and a pair of limbs on each segment, ............

Thank you Delvo.

One of the pleasures of posting on forums like this is you get people who have in depth knowledge of something and give us a good and entertaining lesson.

What you write sounds plausible to me although my knowledge is somewhat limited in this area.