I love it so!

“A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable.”
John A. davison

I also sent an email to Micah asking him to see if he can figure out why edited comments get a / inserted before every ‘ and “. Weird.

This is a known bug in WordPress that has supposedly been fixed in the latest version.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/86389

I’m almost done with Miller’s book. It’s a very interesting attempt to have theology without teleology. (Since it’s a theology consistent with Darwinism, it would have to be non-teleological.)

I definitely give Miller kudos for trying to have his cake and eat it, too. But beyond that, I’m not too sure, yet.

*** The Colbert Report on Evolution vs Creationism ***

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....038;search=

I’m really confused. Is this debate even about evolution? Or is it more about abiogenesis?
ID is about detecting design. ID does not attempt a refutation of evolution. As one of its critics you might be in a better position to detail what it is ID’s opponents are debating.

Surely I.D. requires some tinkering moments in the biological history of earth. (Cambrian explosion)
Why? Did you read where Behe and Dembski said that ID does not require such tinkering?

So to counter that misunderstanding of how evolution works, it’s usually described as unguided or blind. I don’t think the unguided was ever meant to be a statement on God, but on the process itself. …
The use of terms like “unguided” and “blind” are attempts at correcting this. Unfortunately these terms stepped on the toes of some people who felt “unguided” was a statement on their deity.
I believe you are wrong. I think the argument has nothing to do with a misunderstanding of the process and everything to do with making a statement about God. From Darwin’s Origins… on it has been presented as a theological concern.
If Darwinists didn’t mean ‘random’ they wouldn’t have said it. ‘Unpredictable’ would have made the point from the beginning if that were truly the intent.
Also, if they meant that ‘unguided’ only meant that complexity didn’t increase necessarily with evolutionary time then Darwinists such as Harvard’s George Gaylord Simpson wouldn’t say such things as:
“Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic or, in a proper sense of the sometimes abused word, materialistic factors. They are readily explicable on the basis of differential reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random interplay of the known processes of heredity. …Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” [rev. ed. 1967, p. 344-45]

Something isn’t “more evolved” if it’s more complex.
Then you have no problem with the idea of the BF preceding the TTSS, eukaryotes preceding prokaryotes, the greater complexity of LUCA* as compared to modern organisms, or biological front-loading of information and complexity on general?

Besides, this pseudo-orthogenesis is not a misunderstanding of the ignorant, but a working assumption of biologists in the field, and part of the package which is in continual need of refuting:
“Data from many sources, give no direct evidence that eukaryotes evolved by genome fusion between archaea and bacteria.”  … “Unfortunately, such a model has been tacitly favored by molecular biologists who appeared to view evolution as an irreversible march from simple prokaryotes to complex eukaryotes, from unicellular to multicellular.”Kurland, Collins and Penny, “Genomics and the Irreducible Nature of Eukaryote Cells,” Science, 19 May 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5776, pp. 1011 – 1014, DOI: 10.1126/science.1121674.

How else did Darwin, for instance, propose the evolution of the eye but from a “simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect”?

*The idea that organisms become more complex rather than less as you get closer to the root of the tree of life is impossible to swallow, says [David] Saul [U. of Auckland, NZ].  A single LUCA “would have to have had the most bizarre biochemistry imaginable”. John Whitfield in the Feb. 19 issue of Nature.

I’m having trouble getting my comment to show up at Alan’s blog, so I’ll post it here. You can leave your response either here or there. I’ll try to have the problem fixed sometime tomorrow.

Hi Carlos,

I appreciate your response. (BTW, would you prefer I call you Carlos or Dr. Spinoza?)

I’d like to focus on your first paragraph right now if you don’t mind. You mention arrowheads and paintings and say that we can infer that these things are designed because we know the causal processes involved. Let’s suppose you’re out walking around in a natural setting and you come across a rock on the ground that looks strikingly like an arrowhead. In fact, it looks like the most perfectly formed arrowhead you’ve ever seen. Are you justified in concluding that this is an actual artifact crafted by an intelligent agent? Couldn’t it just as easily be the product of wind and erosion? Why isn’t the irregularly shaped rock sitting a few feet away from it designed?

Consider this post I made three months ago: http://www.uncommondescent.com.....hives/1194 . Both formations bear a resemblance of a face, and both could just as easily have been physically caused by either humans or natural erosion. Yet one is considered to be an artifact of the Olmec civilization while the other is regarded simply as the product of erosion. It seems that our detection of design is—in at least some instances—independent of our knowledge of physical causal processes.