Another example of reductive evolution? More bad news for Darwinism
| November 14, 2006 | Posted by scordova under Intelligent Design |
In information science, it is empirically and theoretically shown that noise destroys specified complexity, but cannot create it. Natural selection acting on noise cannot create specified complexity. Thus, information science refutes Darwinian evolution. The following is a great article that illustrates the insufficiency of natural selection to create design.
Key to zebrafish heart regeneration uncovered
“Interestingly, some species have the ability to regenerate appendages, while even fairly closely related species do not,” Poss added. “This leads us to believe that during the course of evolution, regeneration is something that has been lost by some species, rather than an ability that has been gained by other species. The key is to find a way to ‘turn on’ this regenerative ability.”
If the ability to regenerate major organs is hardly visible for natural selection to preserve, how in the world will natural selection be able to even create the ability to regenerate major organs in the first place?
Natural Selection does not trade in the currency of design (ala Allen Orr). I have also argued here why contingency designs are almost invisible to natural selection. The ability to regenerate major organs is an example of a contingency design.
The discovery by these researchers again illustrates the ID’s Law of Conservation of CSI and ID’s formulation of the 4th law of thermodynamics.
(HT: Mike Gene, Telic Thoughts)
44 Responses to Another example of reductive evolution? More bad news for Darwinism
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Jehu wrote:
belief in abiogenesis is irrational and is an obvious demonstration that certain beliefs of scientists are, as you stated, “the false consequences of godless materialism.â€Â
If abiogenesis means life from non-life, isn’t that what it’s got to be, regardless of what the cause(s) might be? With respect to ‘godless materialism’, I think it an unjust and ill conceived concept.
Benjy
Are you telling me that a telic, intelligent, unembodied source of information is alive in the same sense that a plant is alive?
I’m telling you life comes from life and there are no known exceptions.
Put different words in my mouth one more time and it’ll be the last comment you make here.
Benjy, if anyone here uses the term “spontaneous generation” I highly doubt they’re referring to the idea that “complex, living organisms are generated by decaying organic substances, e.g. that mice spontaneously appear in stored grain or maggots spontaneously appear in meat.”
Dizzy,
No. Abiogenesis means life from non-life. If the life is created or designed by another life form it is not abiogenesis, it is biogenesis.
No he does not. There may be some short hand notations that may lead you to think that, but that is not the case. That is a Mark Perakhism.
Furthermore, I asked you to provide a reference, which you did not. You also alluded to a second hand quotation which you did not even provide.
If you’re just going to clog this thread with unsupported assertions, misrepresentations, and further fabricate things IDers never said, and when requested to provide evidence they said something just ignore the request, why bother having a discussion with us.
I asked earlier that you provide a reference with quotation for this claim:
Further you said,
You didn’t even cite the second hand source. Why don’t you cite the original source? Or are you going to pull a Jack Krebs/Pandas Thumb stunt and start commenting on books you’ve not read?
Would everyone agree that, at the moment the first life was formed/began/whatever, biological CSI began to be interpreted? Of course the first biological life came from (or ‘was made from’, the Agency is not important here) non-living matter.
The question may be about the point at which one could say, were he there in spirit, “there is now something alive in the universe.” IOW was the information first expressed in the first biological life, in which cas it existed outside of and independent of biological life, or did CSI evolve into existence piecemeal or gradually.
I agree that gradualism, when applied to biological CSI seems a strange concept indeed, and is the quandry OOL researchers are confronted with.
Benjy,
are you a cosmological-frontloading-ist? Do you believe all the biological CSI was “programmed” into the Universe at the beginning?
DaveScot, you wrote:
I politely asked you to respond to what I thought was a reasonable inference in the context of ID:
You responded:
Then here are the words from my mouth. There are at least two senses in which life can come from life. Organic life can reproduce, by definition. Hypothetically, an intelligent life form can intervene in the material universe to produce an organic life form.
Science relies heavily on induction from empirical observations, despite the fact that induction is logically unsound. All of the many life forms we have observed have been organic, and by induction all life is organic. We have observed many living things to arise by reproduction of existing living things, and never by any other means. By induction, all living things come into being by reproduction.
There is obviously a little problem with the “reasoning” that all living things arise from reproduction of organic life, namely the Big Bang. The empirical evidence is strongly against an infinite regresss of reproduction. Organic life had to originate at some point in the history of the universe.
It is tempting to say here that all life comes from life, and thus the original organic life must have resulted from the intervention of some intelligent life form. This is equivocation on “comes from.” Induction supports “comes from” only in the sense of reproduction. There is no empirical evidence that any intelligent life form ever caused organic life to come into existence by means other than reproduction of itself.
Personally, I believe that a living God created and the universe, but the sense in which God is living is very different from that in which bacteria are living. In any case, I do not see the sense in marking off the origin of organic life for different scientific treatment than biological evolution. If design is manifested in one, it may be in the other as well. A telic and intelligent designer should be able to direct chemical evolution just as well as biological evolution.
kvwells,
What I am driving at in this thread is that ID is in its infancy, and that the strong claims many people make are not warranted by ID research. I contend that we need to come up with as many reasonable hypotheses as we can, and then do the research to test them.
My mind is open, including to the prospect that we will find it very difficult to come up with compelling evidence for design. If we find evidence for cosmological front-loading, so be it. But I am biased in favor of quite the opposite of that. I suspect that the information enters the natural universe constantly, and that design is subtle. Dr. Dembksi’s suggestion in “Searching Large Spaces” that evolution could be guided by a cooperative environment interests me.
scordova,
In reference to the current definition of CSI in “Specification,” I wrote:
You responded:
1) Dembski defined CSI. 2) CSI is a quantity. 3) The I in CSI stands for “information.” The fact that he refers to the quantity as information does no immediately imply that it is information in a conventional sense. You have not responded to my observation that it is not clear to me that taking the logarithm of the count of probabilistic resources gives something we might reasonably interpret as information. Am I missing an associated random event or descriptive complexity? When I look at CSI, what I see is a test statistic, specificity, with a critical value, the log count of probabilistic resources plus 0.5. When specificity exceeds the critical value, design is inferred. CSI looks like specificity (information) with normalization (additive bias) to make the critical value 0.5.
I have not been criticizing CSI, but your claim that it, because Dr. Dembski calls it information, inherits basic properties of better studied forms of information.
I read NFL two years ago, and I do not own it. I did not allude to a quotation. Googling, I found a discussion of CSI gain that gave a page number, but no quotation. In case you wonder why I do not need to cite a source in discussing why the CSI of y = f(x) is bounded above by the CSI of the pair (f, x), I had published a similar result for a different type of information some years before NFL was published. Do you deny that Dembski shows this in NFL?
As for unresponsiveness, I previously indicated that I could find no evidence that Dr. Dembski has written about LCI or the 4th Law in three years, including in his expert reports for the Dover trial, and no one has commented on this. It seems to me that some followers are assigning more significance to them than he presently does.
Benjy,
There is a difference between the measure of information and information itself, Dembski is using a shorthand for the measure of information. Stop repeating the Perakhism I pointed out, you’re just wasting my time.
I invite the reader to read the definition of CSI on page 141. It does not correspond to Benjy’s claim.
Further, Benjy, you still didn’t quote page 155 explicitly but gave your interpretation. I have that page. Give the exact quote rather than flooding this thread with your misrepresentation of what Dembski said, or don’t bother posting to this threads again. Until you accuratly represent what has been said by ID proponnets, you’re just wasting my time.
Salvador,
here is the initial link again with comments…
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_.....111706.php
Here’s a few quotes…
“In this simple experiment, we removed part of the chick embryo’s wing, activated Wnt signaling, and got the whole limb back – a beautiful and perfect wing,” said the lead author, Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, Ph.D., a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory. “By changing the expression of a few genes, you can change the ability of a vertebrate to regenerate their limbs, rebuilding blood vessels, bone, muscles, and skin – everything that is needed.”
“beautiful and perfect wing” huh? in an unguided and purposeless worldview?
One of my questions above was about communication. I was thinking of signals being lost after reading the initial article. This article shows they suspected after early experiments with salamanders the Wnt signal was turned off. It was conserved and present all the time! Now they’re “just” switching it back on at the embyronic stage.
“This new discovery “opens up an entirely new area of research,” Belmonte says. “Even though certain animals have lost their ability to regenerate limbs during evolution, conserved genetic machinery may still be present, and can be put to work again,” he said. Previously, scientists believed that once stem cells turned into muscles, bone or any other type of cells, that was their fate for life – and if those cells were injured, they didn’t regenerate, but grew scar tissue.”
I guess it should make IDers and Creationist excited with the functional processes across a wide variety of species?
Or am I overstating the findings of this research?
Here is the second link in regards to fibroblast that are so important.
http://www.liebertonline.com/d.....alCode=rej
So we have lost essentially two steps that we know of as humans from what I’ve read so far. 1) The initial com signal Wnt and 2) the nano scale architecture fibroblast that form scafolding for the other cell tissue types to rebuild on.
Fascinating!
What a wonderful look at reverse engineering life.
also the abstract at Genes and Development is here…
http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/co......1475106v1
Would be cool if anyone has access to see more info.
Jehu wrote:
quote:
If the life is created or designed by another life form it is not abiogenesis, it is biogenesis.
unquote.
I see, the Intelligent Designer is now confirmed to be a life form, not a supernatural ‘being’. Unless you countgods and other supernatural entities as ‘life forms’?
My POW though, has always been that life as we know it, began with assembling matter (atoms/molecules) into a pattern/configuration that we recognize as, and define as ‘life’. Whether that process was initiated/performed by nature itself or by supernatural forces is being hotly debated and is a different subject.