Re: Ray is and has lost.

On Nov 2, 7:20 am, "Rolf" <rolf.aalb...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
There is much more to be said than I possiby can say here, I don't have all
the time in the world to address all the nonsense he takes time to say
here - time that instead should be spent in finishing his applicaton for the
Nobel prize.

Ray wrote:

-Change at the
-genetic level does not support the main claim of Darwinism:
-speciation. We know change can flourish at the genetic level with
little or no morphological change occurring. Sean, like all gene-
-centricists, is comparable to a submarine. At some point they must
-surface and connect their claims with macro-reality. Evolution is not
-about a change in gene frequencies. It is about Linnaean hierarchal
-classification and the various lines of evidence interpreted to say
-the hierarchy is horizontally connected-evolutionary (includes
-branching). Data referenced by Jonathan Wells shows the utter falsity
-of genetics based evolution (molecular phylogeny).

I write:

That looks like pure nonsense to me.

We know that changes do "occur at the genetic level". Indeed. That's where
they are occurring, all the time. Limiting us to sexual reproduction here,
we see genes are being shuffled and reshuffled all the time, whenever an egg
or a seed is being 'activated'

And the result eventually - in due time, also becomes detectable, observable
in morphology. Sometimes a genetic change may result in pronounced
morphological change too; say as in Down's syndrome and many other cases.

Ray's reference to 'gene frequencies' makes no sense. Basically, genetic
changes of an evolutionary nature occurs when, for any reason, a change
occurs that means an individual, and eventually a number of individuals due
to heredity will have a change to their genes that

is not present in the rest of the population. That change may be good or
bad, and natural selection will determine the outcome. If the change is bad,
i.e. results in the bearers of that particular gene are statistically less
successful than average for the population, such changes will eventually
disappear from the population, being swamped by the dominant genetic setup.

If the change is neutral, it may persist for a long time. If on the other
hand the change confers an advantage however slight to the bearers of the
gene, resulting in a statistically higher reproduction rate, that is bound
to result in a higher 'frequency' of that genetic setup in the population..

That's my amateurs take on the subject, and I find it so simple and obvious
that it takes a genius of Ray's proportions to not being able to understand
it. Or, more likely he does not want to understand, does not want to know
and is in total denial.

I don't see any reason to bother with Jonathan Wells in connection with this
subject.

Ray:

-The only
-point I wish to stress is that evolution, speciation, macroevolution
-is not supported or proven just because we discover that which was
-always occurring (change at the genetic level). .

Me:

But that is the whole idea - genetic changes may or may not have significant
consequences, it all depends. And Ray completely ignores all the various
kinds of mutational changes possible. He also must be completely unaware of
how much we know about genetics today, compared with what we knew as recent
as, say, ten years ago. He ought at least to read Carroll's "Endless Forms
Most Beautiful", and learn a little something about the homeobox, hox genes,
regulatory genes and so on, and learn how small genetic changes may have a
big effect.

And if he would read something like "The First Chimpanzee", he might learn
what neoteny is, how it works, and realize that we do not necessarily need
big genetic changes to see dramatic evolutionary consequences. He might
learn about the Axolotl. He might discover such simple and telling facts
like an infant chimp is more capable than a human baby, but with time, while
the chimp will mature and never develop beyond a certain stage; a human has
a prolonged childhood and his maturing doesn't really end before in his
early twenties.

A human may be thought of as an ape that profits by exploiting and extending
the ape's infant properties instead of becoming mentally ossified at an
early age. If I am able to express the concept properly.

I seem to remember reading something about the human birth too; it has been
likened to some sort of abortion.

Ernst Cassirer wrote an oft-quoted book on the subject of man as 'the symbol
animal', I guess I will have to try to find me a copy of that.

IIRC; P.Z. Myers had a very interesting article about genetics at Pandas
Thumb a couple of years ago. While we should not beware of taking the
analogy too far, it was very interesting to see how a striking
correspondence with much of what we find in combinatorial logic systems like
in digital electronics can be seen in genetics too. Nothing mystical, just
physics and chemistry at work all the way down.

Much more evidence is of course available too, but Ray is not interested in
real evidence. To him, evidence is what lurks in the dark recesses of his
mind.

Says Ray:

To me it seems
-better for an IDist to advocate "designed change" accomplished by
-mechanism(s) that reflect Intelligence since what results in reality
-is design, organized complexity and adaptation.

Says I:

What 'mechanisms'? Invisible designer snapping invisible fingers?

Or is he using a laboratory like all know designers do?

"Organized complexity and adaptation", what is that?

A transcript made at the DDD3 conference in 2002 says:

Question from the audience: I'd be interested in hearing you tell us a
little bit about what your theory of intelligent design is, as opposed to
what evolution isn't.

Behe replies: Well, that's a great question, and I know folks on the other
side who are sceptical of intelligent design often get frustrated, but I try
to be as conservative as I can and I don't go out beyond what the data can
support because I think overreaching is the bane of theories of design. You
say that flagellum looks designed so everything is designed, or that
everything that looks complex was designed, or something like that.

I think the short answer to your question is, for all of those things, I don
't know.

There not enough data. For the elephant, we have primelephus, the ancestral
elephant of the Asian and African elephant, and mammoth. Well, could that
happened by random mutation and natural selection? My instinctive answer is
sure - it sure looks like it. It doesn't look like any big deal.

The more careful answer, the actual answer, is I don't know - cause I don't
know what's involved in making one versus the other. I don't know what
molecular changes are necessary to make the small anatomical differences in
those different species.

Suppose one believed that those things could have happened by natural
selection, but maybe the origination of mammals needed some extra
information - how would that have happened - how would the designer have
done that? Would it have been, say, information embedded into nature at the
big bang, or whenever nature started, or might it have been manipulations
along the way, or some sort of input along the way?

The short answer is "I don't know."

Said Behe.

Another quote from Ray:

You are absolutely correct when you say that speciation is an
interpretation of evidence. Science before 1859 knew it was a false
interpretation of evidence. This is why science before 1859 held
species to be immutable.

End of quote.

A good example of how confused Ray's argumentation is. 'What science knew
before 1859' hardly is of much relevance. Science knew very little if
anything about this subject before 1859.

We had quite a good deal of geological and palaeontological evidence, but it
was not until the publication of "Origins" that some understanding of what
it meant began to be appreciated.

We had no science that knew anything about true or false interpretation of
evidence, we had science scratching its head to make heads or tails of what
little evidence we had.

But Darwin did more than scratch his head; he studied nature, collected
evidence - and laid down a considerable effort in his groundbreaking effort
of making sense of all the evidence.

His contribution was that he discovered the principles that could explain
the evidence. Evidence that we do not understand is like a book that we do
not open.

Darwin cracked open the book of evolution.

Before Darwin, we did not understand the evidence we had. People, including
scientists, did not know what the evidence meant.

There were quite a lot of things that we did not know, did not understand in
1849.

It once was thought that the end of physics was near; the atomic model, the
atom with a nucleus of protons and neutrons and a number of electrons in
orbit was all here was thought to be all there was.

While today we know that there is very much that we simply do not
understand, at least not yet.

Ray doesn't seem to acknowledge that science is an ongoing project, we learn
something new every day.

Looking at what he writes, we find a strange preoccupation with writers and
writings that are quite dated.

We need not concern ourselves with what Darwin or Carl von Linné thought
except in a historical context.

In the context of the theory of evolution in the 21st century, we have much
more informative and interesting writings to relate to.

Why don't Ray ever address the works of people like Vincent Sarich and Allan
Wilson, Richard Leakey, Niles Eldredge & S.J. Gould, E. Zuckerkandl, David
Pilbeam, Richard Fortey, Sean B. Carroll, just to pick a few from the top of
my head?

Ray simply is completely out of touch with reality and the current stand of
our sciences.

I don't think he has read Einstein, Hawking or R. B. Laughlin either. Or any
of the fine articles that we sometimes find at Pandas Thumb.

Myself, I have read much more than that. Albert Schweitzer, Carl Gustav
Jung, Sigmund Freud, John Allegro and many others that I just cant remember
the names of.

In addition to all the other stuff, From John Steinbeck, Louis Bromfield,
Damon Runyon, Jack London, Ben Hecht, William Saroyan, Truman Capote, Norman
Mailer, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Phil K.
*** to Elaine Morgan and Elaine Pagels. And Raymond Chandler, Mickey
Spillane. And of course Mark Twain. But not Kerouac or Walt Whitman.

So where is Ray? Lost in antiquities and ancient myths, imprisoned in the
maze of his own quirky mind.

There's always the chance that Ray is saying all that to throw us off,
and that his paper will have the real data that demolish "Darwinism."
And that the paper will be published on 2/12/09, just days after
President Barr is inaugurated. ;-)

.

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