From my point of view, that’s the easy part. I’m asking you to not only give an example of an evolved wing but an example of a designed wing and explain how you know one is designed and one evolved.

Yes but remember this discussion began with PaulBurnett commenting that Kiwi’s wings were an example of unintelligent design.

As for the second part, because apparently the answer is not obvious to you, the birds wing, along with feathers and the specialized avian lung, were designed. Extant birds may have lost some genetic information form the original design(s) to greater or lesser degrees depending on the selective pressure that they are under. Kiwis, for example, have lost a lot.

How do I know? Natural selection is barely able to conserve information, much less create it. Where a supposed evolutionary pathway requires more than two mutations to achieve the next selective benefit there is not enough reproductive power in a low reproducing organism like an avian to search the necessary mutational space to make such a genetic leap probable. For the bird’s wing, including feather and lung, it is improbable that any such mutational path exists, therefore, the wing, feather, and lung complex was designed.

Now this all a bit tedious because you continue to posture as if you have some ace bit of knowledge that will carry the day but all you do is ask questions that should be transparently obvious.

Sadly, you are simply — and demonstrably — “wrong but strong.”

GEM of TKI

clearly not.

The definition of Selective Hyperskepticism you proffer describes your own position very well, thank you for making that clear.

…is to further exemplify just how routinely and habitually Darwinists seek to distract by using red herrings, led out to distorted strawmannish misrepresentations of arguments they oppose…

In what way is calling you up on your behavior a distraction from the issue of your behavior?

In short, your turnabout accusation-based argument manifestly fails.

I rest my case.

You have forgotten just one thing: I have shown, in responsible details [and have often linked], just what selective hyperskepticism is, and how/why it fails to be a sound approach to epistemology; with particular reference to the failure of Cliffordian-Saganian — “extraordinary claims require extraordinary [ADEQUATE] evidence” — evidentialism. (And in fact, in so doing, I am self-confessedly giving a descriptive label to a pattern of fallacious thought ling since identified by Mr Simon Greenleaf of Harvard; who just happens to be a founding father of the theory of evidence. [So, it is not just a mere humble blog commenter you are trying to rebut . .. )

Summarising from my proffered "definition" (description, really):

Selective Hyperskepticism: that fallacy which seeks to reject otherwise credible evidence by demanding an inappropriately high type or degree of warrant not applicable to matters of fact, i.e. the general type of question being discussed. Especially, where the same standard is not exerted in assessing substantially parallel cases that make claims that one is inclined to accept.

In short, your turnabout accusation-based argument manifestly fails.

You may also link references to me to make me out to be a hypocrite all you want; all you are achieving thereby in light of the actual balance on the merits, is to further exemplify just how routinely and habitually Darwinists seek to distract by using red herrings, led out to distorted strawmannish misrepresentations of arguments they oppose -- duly soaked in ad hominems -- and then proceed to ignite them to cloud the atmosphere, confusing, poisoning and choking it with polarisation. [Which is of course a classic extreme form of selectively hyperskeptical patterns of rhetoric.]

GEM of TKI

PS: Onlookers, you may wish to see my remarks on the underlying dynamics and circumstances at work here.

PPS: And, Sparc et al, I did not seek to “escape” from the just linked thread to here, but was about real world life after signing off from UD yesterday.

PPS: For those who want to see what ID methodology looks like, I suggest a glance here.

That’s because “creationist” has more and more become just a barbed — and otherwise largely meaningless — smear word used by darwinist advocates to tag those one wishes to dismiss without actually addressing what they have to say on the merits.

Oh, you mean like

“closed minded objectionist selective hyperskepticism”

or

“Darwinist Evo Mat”

You constantly complain about ‘oil of Ad Hominem soaked straw men’ and yet many of your posts seem to contain slurs against the people who are trying to debate with you as, instead of just addressing their points, you try and cast them as some evil curse on society, the root of all the modern worlds ills and appeal to ‘onlookers’ to adopt your blind disdain for anyone who questions your opinion or your twisted interpretation of facts.

You rarely address peoples arguments on their merits alone, your arguments are always cached in terms of your own presumed moral superiority and your opponents apparent immorality, and then fluffed up with clouds of cut’n'paste obfuscation – another thing which you preach against yet practice to excess.

And YES I am making personal criticisms of you because your impersonal behavior is so below the bar of enlightened scholarly discourse that it needs to be addressed. Now the real question is, do you have the honor and humility to apologize or is that aspect of Christianity something you prefer to opt out of?

That said you do such an excellent job of discrediting ID I could almost believe you were actually an Agent provocateur’.

A well-documented rebuttal of the evidence provided to front-loaders by information coming from the ENCODE Project is doubtlessly going to follow.

…or perhaps some more charactor assasignation.

You wrote:

But on what basis have you assumed it was designed in the first place?

I haven’t. As I said, I’m a front-loader. While I believe that the first cell was designed for reasons discussed here, I’m fairly agnostic about subsequent features of organisms. When it comes to investigating a feature of organisms whose evolution we haven’t witnessed, I believe that agnosticism is an appropriate attitude until we get the big picture. That way, we avoid falling victim to our own philosophical preconceptions.

The ascription of design to a structure found in organisms is not an assumption but a conclusion. This conclusion is reached only when it appears reasonably certain that no plausible natural mechanism for generating that structure exists.

If I found such a pathway, and if there were sufficient time available in geological history for the pathway to have been traversed, I’d conclude that the wing wasn’t designed.

But on what basis have you assumed it was designed in the first place?

Personally, I’m a front-loader. I believe DNA was designed; I’m less sure about bird wings. To be truthful, I don’t know much about bird wings, but if I wanted to find out whether one was designed or not, this is what I’d do.

METHOD A

1. Identify the genes that code for that wing, in terms of its embryological development and its structural components.

2. Identify a plausible antecedent for the wing – i.e. the structure it supposedly evolved from. (How? Look around the animal kingdom – and especially at reptile anatomy, as birds are descended from primitive reptiles.)

3. Identify the genes coding for that structure.

4. Recalling that evolution takes place at the level of the gene, and that “nature does not make leaps,” I’d try to find a stepwise incremental pathway from the genes identified in step 3 to the genes identified in step 1, such that no step along the pathway reduced the organism’s fitness.

5. If I found such a pathway, and if there were sufficient time available in geological history for the pathway to have been traversed, I’d conclude that the wing wasn’t designed.

6. In the absence of such a pathway, I’d conclude that it probably was designed.

METHOD B
(A “second-best” method, much inferior to Method A. Could be used as a “stopgap” until detailed genetic data became available, but any conclusions reached via this method would be necessarily provisional.)

1. Identify the feature of the wing which appeared least likely to have evolved – roughly, the feature possessing the greatest (specific or irreducible) complexity. If I could then explain the evolution of that feature, it would be fair to conclude that the rest of the wing had evolved too.

2. In the absence of detailed information regarding the genes that give rise to that wing, I’d then look at the structural components of the feature identified in 1.

3. If I found that the components identified in 2 could be re-arranged so that the wing functioned in a more efficient manner, without interfering with the other bodily functions of the bird in question, and if I had no reason to suppose that the bird’s ancestors had ever possessed this more efficient functioning (i.e. if there were no evidence that devolution had occurred), then I’d conclude that the wing in question probably wasn’t designed.

N.B. The minimal “behavioral” assumption I’m making in step 3 is that an intelligent designer would arrange whatever components it selected to design with, in such a way that the structure it built functioned as well as it possibly could, given those components, without impeding any other bodily functions of the organism in question. In other words, any designer worth his or her salt should at least do the best he or she can with the materials he or she has selected.

4. Try to find a plausible antecedent for the feature identified in step 1 – i.e. the structure it supposedly evolved from.

5. If I found (by performing computer simulations) that the feature couldn’t plausibly have been built up step by step from its suuposed antecedent, or from any other plausible antecedent, without compromising the organism’s fitness, then I’d conclude that it was probably designed.

6. If I found that the feature in question was irreducibly complex, and that there was no plausible pathway by which the feature could have “devolved” from something which had more parts but was reducibly (instead of irreducibly) complex, then I’d say it was probably designed.

7. What would really perplex me is finding a feature where different considerations pulled me in opposite directions – i.e. where applying step 3 led me to believe that it hadn’t been designed, but steps 5 or 6 led me to believe that it had.

NOW HERE’S THE “METHOD” USED IN MOST EVOLUTION TEXTBOOKS TO ARGUE AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN

1. Find an aspect of a complex structure that looks sub-optimal.

2. Don’t bother to rigorously test whether it actually performs sub-optimally; if it looks clumsy, that’s enough. It’s a kludge.

OR:

1. Find a complex structure, and then try to think of a way in which the function it performs could be improved, using different parts and/or materials. (After all, God can use any parts He likes, can’t He?)

2. Don’t bother to check if the “new and improved” design you imagined (using different parts and/or materials) would interfere with the other functions of the organism. If there’s a more efficient way to perform the function, then the structure performing it wasn’t designed.

Now that’s what I call lazy thinking.

That’s because “creationist” has more and more become just a barbed — and otherwise largely meaningless — smear word used by darwinist advocates to tag those one wishes to dismiss without actually addressing what they have to say on the merits.

The ongoing Answers to judge Jones thread gives sad but ample cases in point. For, instead of dealing with a serious — and ID-foundational — 1984 technical monograph on the merits, Darwinist advocates have taken to tagging the author of the foreword and the authors of the monograph then dismissing them.

Poisoning the atmosphere.

GEM of TKI