Re: Sean loses interest

(M)-adman wrote:
Seanpit wrote:
On Oct 21, 3:08 pm, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Seanpit wrote:
On Oct 21, 11:15 am, John Harshman
<jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sean Pitman seems to have lost interest in replying to my posts.
This happens every so often, and I generally attribute it to his
having painted himself into a corner. And so I interpret it this
time.
Of course you wouldn't consider that responding to 20+ page posts of
yours where you present your endless just-so stories without any
actual genetic backing is an exercise in futility that simply
doesn't interest me anymore . . .
No, I wouldn't.

Let's see. We have "Nilsson & Pelger's eye-evolution 'model', in
which I show how he's mischaracterized that often-cited paper.
I seem to have missed the part where your assertions overlapping
ranges of expression of each proposed steppingstone is actually a
reality. You don't seem to understand that going from a flat light-
sensitive spot to even a slightly concaved disk isn't easy. Such a
change would require the unified arrangement of many light sensitive
cells. This unified activity of so many different cells would
require more than just a handful of specific mutations. Beyond
this, it just doesn't happen. There isn't any such example in
nature or even under experimental conditions beyond just-so story
assumptions.
You are the one mischaracterizing the Nilsson Pelger paper - not me.
I merely point out that the functions involved in determining acuity
(and on that assumption, fitness) are continuous. There are no
"stepping stones". A 1% change was chosen arbitrarily, for
convenience. Smaller changes could have been picked. And in fact
small changes in shape happen all the time as a result of genetic
variation. Your notion of "unified arrangement of many light
sensitive cells" just shows how ignorant you are of how development
works.
If I'm so ignorant produce a real life example that goes beyond just-
so story imaginations. If you think it is so easy for one or two
mutations to produce a collective coordinated response in thousands of
cells to go from a flat surface to even a very shallow cup-shaped
surface, please do present your evidence.

You see, in real life, there are steppingstones where nothing in-
between would be selectively beneficial. There is no pathway of
single mutations that would be sequentially selectable in going from a
flat surface to a cup-shaped surface - however shallow. That notion
is based on nothing more than wishful thinking. If it were really
this easy, it should be very easy to demonstrate experimentally. No
such experiments have ever been successful. The only "experiments"
that have ever been done at such levels of complexity are strictly
imaginary morphologic scenarios that never leave the paper they're
written on to make it into real life testing much less demonstration.

And there's "Chromosomes and Pyramids", in which he believes in an
old earth without being to point to any evidence of its age,
I've already explained this to you several times now. I think that
the planet itself is likely to be quite old indeed based on non-
radiometric measures of the age of the universe and extrapolations
of stellar and planetary evolution. Do such estimates produce a
specific age? Nope. I don't think that is possible. But, they do
suggest that the age is likely to be quite old - probably at least
several billion years old.
And I have explained to you that this is nonsense. None of this
tells us that the earth is several billion years old. At best, you
can say that the sun and earth are old enough for the sun to have
entered the main sequence, and not old enough to have left it. This
doesn't require billions of years at all.
"The Sun's current main sequence age, determined using computer
models of stellar evolution and nucleocosmochronology, is thought to
be about 4.57 billion years."

Of course, I have problems with radiometric dating methods and
therefore nucleocosmochromonolgy is not convincing to me. However, I
don't see any significant problems with computer models of stellar
evolution which suggest that the Sun is a middle-aged start with
another 4 billion or so years left to go.

And of course you reject radiometric dating only because it gives us
answers you don't like.
Not at all. I reject it because it doesn't seem to me to be
consistent with all the available evidence. After all, I don't have a
problem with the old age of the universe or of the solar system or of
the planetary form of Earth. I just have a problem with the old age
life because the evidence points strongly against that particular
notion.

But let's accept this several billion year old planet. What happened
during the existence of the earth prior to a few thousand years ago?
I don't know?

Do
we have any rocks from that time (by "time" I refer to all but a
negligible fraction of earth's history)? How would we tell?
I don't know that either? I don't think anybody does.

proposes that
we should invoke ID only when there is no natural explanation but
rejects common descent even though he agrees there is a natural
explanation for the nested hierarchy of life,
Rather, I point out to you that the involvement of ID in key aspects
of the ToL requires that one have additional evidence to support the
theory of common descent beyond the pattern itself.
You make that claim, but provide no reasons why it should be true. In
fact your own attempted analogies argue otherwise, and you yourself
raised a generaly principle that contradicts our claim.
I disagree . . .

You yourself have admitted, at least in the past, that overwhelming
evidence for young life on this planet would make the CD hypothesis
untenable. This in itself proves my point - that the pattern itself
is not enough to adequately conclude CD given the involvement of ID.
That is why you rest your belief in CD quite strongly on your
interpretation of the fossil record and geologic column.

And of course there is additional evidence. There's the biogeographic
distribution of species, which is clearly non-random with respect to
phylogeny, including the convergent evolution of similar adaptations
on isolated continents. There's the correspondence of phylogeny with
the order of appearances in the fossil record. There is the fact that
there's an order of appearance at all. As you have so nicely shown,
there is the evolution of similar adaptations by independent
recruitment of paralogous genes. There's the match between
mitochondrial and nuclear trees. Quite a bit, really, but it's all
just gravy; we could infer common descent quite well without any of
it.
There you go again - invoking your interpretation of the fossil record
to support your belief in CD. Given your interpretation of the fossil
record as true, CD is indeed a very reasonable conclusion. But, it
isn't a conclusion based only on the NHP given the requirement for ID
in producing the key functional differences of the ToL.

You do in fact
use your interpretation of the fossil record to support your CD
theory. If the evidence for a young fossil record became
overwhelming to you, there would be no way you could accept the CD
theory for even the NHP of the ToL. In other words, the CD theory
requires more information than just the pattern itself when ID is
known to be involved.
Not true at all. If it were shown that life were young, that would
just mean that evolution and speciation would have to proceed at
ridiculously high rates until just before we were able to notice,
and then slow down by many orders of magnitude. Silly, yes. But less
silly than explaining nested hierarchy by the whim of a creator.
LOL - Oh come on. Even you aren't this silly. And, even if you are,
the vast majority of people, even among mainstream scientists,
wouldn't be this silly. If the majority of the scientific community
became convinced that life on this planet is in fact no older than
~10,000 years or so, the vast majority would also become IDists at the
same time. You might be a holdout, but you'd be quite lonely.

Fortunately we are not forced into any such ridiculous theories,
because there is abundant evidence that life is very old. Darwin
rightly held out against Kelvin's attempts to limit the age of the
world, until radioactivity resolved the apparent contradiction.
That certainly is a lovely opinion - and popular to boot! But, it
isn't based on the NHP alone.

and is unable to explain
paralogous origins of genes of similar function.
I really don't know what you're talking about here?
What else is new? I'm talking about the reptilian and platypus
toxins. If you will recall, I predicted their phylogenetic
relationships on the basis of the theory of common descent, and so
have tested the theory. I asked how common design can explain this,
but you haven't answered.
You originally said that convergent evolution of individual proteins,
individual protein sequences and motifs, would be unexpected via CD
theory. What are you trying to argue now?

Are there only two, or did I miss some? Never mind, those will do.
Whatever. I'm just not as interested anymore with your ideas since
I've already heard them and gone over them with you many times.
Other topics are more interesting to me right now . . . sorry.
I notice that you do seem to lose interest whenever you find
yourself in a big enough hole. Just wanted to point that out.
That's how you would interpret it - no doubt. It simply couldn't be
that other topics and ideas are more interesting than yours! ; )

You are an arrogant one though, however misguided and thick skulled -
and I kinda like that about you. Hang in there . . .

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


THIS sounds like bull*** to me

Hey, look. Sean has a creationist critic!

.

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