Even YECs understand that plants act differently than animals.

In a YEC scenario plants do not “reproduce after their own Kind”. That only pertains to animals.

So while your point about plants is interesting it does NOT do anything to support your case.

So what part of all that don’t you understand?

I understand it, it’s just wrong.

Nature is not selecting anything. Nature is not preserving, eliminating or building anything. Rather,
organisms express and suppress traits according to need in an algorithmic fashion; a big difference IMB.

It is important to not confuse the metaphor with the object of interest.

It seems from your comment below that you miss the point. There are always offspring that live to adulthood and reproduce regardless of any inherited trait. Both offspring with advantageous traits and without both make it to the finish line.

I’m afraid it’s you that missed my point entirely. It is not that individuals with both make it to the finish line, its the differential proportions of those with the respective traits that make it that is important.If more with the advantageous trait make it, the trait will become more and more common, sometimes even replaving the less advantageous variant. This is simple, observable, and well-recorded population genetics.

If I understand you correctly, if I trace the life history of all zygotes from conception to death, there is no difference in reproductive success based on their phenotype? The weak and the strong produce, on average, the same number of offspring that themselves live to reproductive age? The runt of the litter does as well as the alpha male?

Thanks for your comment.

It seems from your comment below that you miss the point. There are always offspring that live to adulthood and reproduce regardless of any inherited trait. Both offspring with advantageous traits and without both make it to the finish line. In your words, traits will become common then not common, common, then not common.

Nature is not selecting anything. Nature is not preserving, eliminating or building anything. Rather, organisms express and suppress traits according to need in an algorithmic fashion; a big difference IMB.

Organisms exhibit (as described above)genomic plasticity. Yet they cannot build upon mutations as Neo-Darwinism claims in order to break environmental risk thresholds.

Adaptability is not evolution. Evolution, defined in its original sense as an unfolding of life, happened and the past and is finished.

What biological activity we witness now is basically the running of a maintenance program; peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys, with no new plateaus reached.

Natural selection is simply differential reproductive success. Consider any heritable trait. A variant of that trait which enables individuals possessing it to have more offspring who live to adulthood than those which possess other variants will become more common in the population.

That is not a figment of the imagination. It is a simple, observable, predictable (indeed inevitable) demographic fact.

Natural selection is a figment of the imagination.

1. All animals produce healthy and weak offspring at each generation.

2. Healthy and weak offspring all reproduce. ‘Strong’ genes and ‘weak’ genes are both required for the stability of the organism.
3. All animal types survive on the basis of cooperation, not competition. Competitive activity within a group scrambles the gene pool in order keep the reproductive ratio stable; never too many strong, never too many weak.

It is the consistent reproduction of both healthy AND weak offspring that allows the animal kingdom the possibility of mutual survival.

I.E. the rabbit produces several to keep a couple. The snake produces hundreds to keep several. The insect produces thousands to keep hundreds.

In essence, it is the weak that are the pillars of life.

I see that you have another long post so I will read that before responding, but I think somehow we are talking past each other and not engaging. Because the questions I am asking seem eminently sensible to me, no matter what the structure of coral reef communities look like. I cannot get traction, whether because of my inadequate communication skills or my lack of Ph.D. credentials in science (or anything else – I’m an M.S. guy) but if the difference between life and non-life is information, and who doesn’t think that is true, then information is the key. Information MUST be explainable in a coherent and rational way or else nothing has been explained. Let me read your next post and I’ll get back to you.

This ["physically inert meaning"] is the concept that I offered to you as an observationally verifiable entailment of the theory of Design – as per your specific request.

(Emphasis in the original.)

This beautifully captures what is misguided in your predicted “observation,” and what renders it unretrievably gauzy and scientifically useless in its current form: you confuse theoretical conjecture with observation. Simply put, one doesn’t observe concepts. Observation consists in counting, measuring, weighing, noting the positions of indicators, recording velocities and locations, noting operationally defined features, developing photographic plates, and on and on, sometimes with the aid of instrumentation. One cannot “observe” conceptually abstract and operationally undefined notions such as “physically inert meaning.” Such a notion belongs at the level of theory, which is constructed to both predict and confer meaning upon specific observations.

It is because theory is conceptual rather than observational that entailments are required that arise necessarily from one’s theory, in turn giving rise to predictions of specific observable phenomena that can be counted, weighed, measured, and so forth, a process above illustrated by BB theory and the CBR. In your case, what you want to say is that your theory of design necessarily gives rise to physically inert meaning (you don’t say why this is a necessary entailment – can’t the designer design otherwise? – but that is another problem), AND that physically inert meaning gives rise to particular entailments that CAN be observed (counted, weighed, measured, detected, etc.) in particular contexts. Those predicted observations include _____________, which indeed must be observed or your theory is placed at risk of disconfirmation. This is what I have been requesting throughout, and what you have yet to supply. I notice that Abel does no better. At the end of his article he punts: rather than suggesting empirical findings that flow from his theoretical prose he challenges evolutionary biology to support its theory instead.

More generally, the complexity of living organisms, including to whatever degree biological phenomena can be an analogized to the human use of symbols, is the phenomena that calls for explanation, and is not itself, alone, evidence for a particular explanatory theory. Simply stating “design entails physically inert meaning” then pointing to “the function of life” and making the bare assertion that it displays “physically inert meaning” (including the further bare assertions that it is an entailment of design AND can only have arisen from design) does nothing more than restate your hypothesis. That is rather like developing a theory of a murder, then citing the fact that the victim is dead in support of your theory. All theories of the crime culminate in a person being dead.

Until ID takes the risk of offering a theory that includes “moving parts” – necessary entailments concerning design, the designer, etc., as well as the unique observational consequences of those entailments – it will remain stillborn as well.

Bold type, like all caps, does not make an assertion more true.