The idea is that evolution is analogous to one animal trying to cross a highway. It’s confusing becasue it’s such a lousy analogy.
Behe’s explanation of it isn’t very good, so I’ll post Pennock’s explanation with enough Behe to give you the flavor:
Opus1 wrote:
Then why is it so difficult for me to get laid?
Wait, don’t answer that…
Damn, I have to work late trying to get four hundred seperate sites ready for a new drug study, and everyone else says everything I would say…
Behe’s argument from Irreducible Complexity is flawed because he does not take into account that an elegant system could be the pared down remnant of a less efficient system. He proposes a rather clever argument from ignorance wherein he says, in effect, “I cannot figure out how this could have evolved through the addition of elements, therefore it must have been designed by an entity far more intelligent than I.”
And if you start out with single celled eukaryotes, and an empty ocean, eventually some of the colonies will act as communal organisms to the detriment of some of their singleton neighbors. Once that starts, selection will form better multicellular organisms.
And if you start out with a million tortoises, a few of them will be lucky enough to cross the road.
tracer
the question concerned your peers, and as we know, your peers are also pathetic geek-boys.
Sorry to have to point that out.
I can’t help noticing that there is only one creationist participating in this thread.
Could it be that you have all been snared by a troll?
I suggest that creationists provide the same breadth of evidenceto support their “theory”, that they demand of those who accept evolution as a given.
Might I recommend also Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen - Sex and the evolution of human nature.
It may help OPer understand evolution’s influence on his thinking (I’m not being abusive here)
It may also help tracker understand lack of getting laid
I find it interesting to consider the title of this thread: “Why it isn’t evolution - proof against Darwin”.
It appears to me that the only proof that has been offered is Behe’s fallacious “I can’t conceive of how it happened, therefore it never happened”.
Note that Behe has not proposed his theories in any scientific forum (The Elusive Scientific Basis of Intelligent Design Theory).
** HideoHo** hasn’t shown any particular trollish characteristics, and I think it’s unfair to use the word. He/she appears to be misguided and ignorant, but not malicious.
tracer replied to opus1: *“There was no first person who couldn’t have sex with his peers,…”
Then why is it so difficult for me to get laid? *
Maybe you’re just too highly evolved. That’s it, you’ve speciated as an individual! Gosh, tracer, you’ll be famous! I can see it now, the book contracts, the talk shows, the groupies—ooops, well, so much for that. 
DrFidelius writes:
I suppose it would inappropriate to point out that, since the “designer” consists of random and non-sentient forces, Behe’s argument is in fact correct? 
Why does the tortoise cross the road?
In the real world, the tortoise (or its descendants) which survive are the winners, no matter whether they crossed the road or not. Descent with modification is not goal oriented.
It is easy and quite human to look back and wonder how unlikely a path leading to a particular situation may be. This overlooks the point that ANY GIVEN SITUATION is equally unlikely. When one shuffles a deck of cards, the chance of any given order arising is slight. BUT, an order will be there, and saying that it is unlikely does not make the cards disappear, or alter the mechanisms of the shuffling.
Well, he (and considering the name “John” at the end of his first message, I think that it safe to assume that this poster is male) did say:
Which implies that people on this board have called him a religious nut. Unless he can give an example of such an occurrance, this looks like the classic “whoever disagrees with me is biased against anyone that disagrees with them”/“all of your arguments have been simply ad hominem attacks” ploy. Not exactly the attitude of someone looking for an honest debate.
Oh, and Mooney252: the title of the X-Files episode was “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’”. Jose Chung wrote a book called “From Outer Space”, and the apostrophe s denotes a possesive.
Looking at this thread its not exactly hard to think that people are calling him a religious nut. Its because of people who gloat and say “if you have misconceptions about evolution you are a religious nut”
A little story. As I am a dork.
Once, there was a man by the name of Walter Gehring at the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland. He ran a lab with lots of smart postdocs.
One day about 7 years ago, he isolated a fruit fly that had no eyes. As is the standard with fruit flies, he did the forward genetics to clone a novel gene, which he called eyeless. This proved to be quite a neat gene, as it proved through a number of beautiful experiments, to be close to the master switch gene which turned on eye development. In fact, if he turned it on in wings or legs in the fruit fly, they grew eyes on their wings or on their legs.
As this was such an important gene, he began to look for similar genes in other species. And guess what? He found homologs to eyeless in every species with eyes that he looked at. Planaria (flatworms) with eyespots have a copy. Squid have a copy. Humans have copies, mice have copies. And guess what? If you mutated the mouse gene, they got small eyes. In fact, the gene was named Small eye. And guess what? Some humans had mutations in the gene (called Pax-6), and they suffered from hereditary aniridia, or lack of an iris. And yet, all the proteins were slightly different, depending where on the evolutionary tree they fell. And yet, squid and mouse eyeless copies could still make flies grow eyes on their wings and legs.
Evolutionarily, this demonstrates that something very complex (and varied across species) shares a simple root. Since the first multicellular organisms that developed a group of photosensitive cells, we have had the eyeless system. We still all have it. We started with something simple, and it was advantageous, and we have maintained it. It is an unarguable point to say that a divine creator must have used this system (changed slightly) in all animals to make eyes of TOTALLY different structures (squid, planarian, fruitfly, and human eyes all work very differently) and of TOTALLY different origins (the eye is from the brain in humans and from the epithelium in flies). It does however argue for a simple beginning and branching with different levels of complexity being added in different forms in each branch.
It certainly isn’t hard to do so if one is determined to interpret dissent in that manner. However, if one is objective, there is no reason to think that he has been called a religious nut.
Huh? I haven’t seen that around here.
The Ryan wrote:
Although I must admit, most of the folks around here that post creationist-slanted misconceptions about evolution do turn out to be religious nuts.
– tracer, hoping I haven’t speciated.
I’m still kinda wondering what version of Darwin’s Black Box he read. The conclusions do not seem to be closely related to anything in that book.
Or, it could just show poor reading comprehension…
HideoHo,
You said ‘The chances of the spontaneous life occurrence was calculated as 1/ largest number ever (number of times every hydrogen electron has gone around it’s nucleus since the beginning of time) and while this is still a chance, not a statistically possible one.’
What is the ‘largest number ever’? *
When was ‘the beginning of time’? **
Assuming that you do calculate a really BIG number (I like googolplexes myself), and decide the chance of something is ‘1 in a googolplex’, then this is indeed the chance of it occurring. It is also statistically possible (I think perhaps you meant jolly unlikely).
- move over infinity, you’re history :rolleyes:
** 4004 BC, perhaps, Bishop
And one more thing, I don’t believe in God as depicted in the Judeo-Christian Bible, but I do believe that someone Divine designed the universe, and the Earth. The design is still an ongoing process.
So where the heck is HideoHo, and when is he going to explain protein homology? Didn’t he say he was into the biochemical challenge to evolution?
-Ben
Wow:) This thread is amusing, methinks.
While I couldn’t bring myself to read through the whole thread, it is obviouse the HideoHo needs to do some more reading as the views held in the book in question are not those held by most of the sci. community, I think most would agree.
Granted, there is no “Right” or “Wrong” because no one can go back in time at this point and bring us the whole story.
However, Evolution is a fact. The mechanisms by which it operates are not certain. I find it funny that people STILL are fighting against Evolution in general as there is overwhelming evidence for this. It must be odd to go through life blinded by relgious dogma and such- granted I used to date a woman like this:) It is very amusing sometimes, albeit frustrating.
I would suggest reading: Biogenesis : Theories of Life’s Origin by Noam Lahav, if you have questions about microevolution and the origin of life through the evolution of man… There are also many other references cited in this work.
Chris