But then you demand that Dr. Meyer should have explored the possibilities that metals could have played in the origin of life. You write “All Axe has proven is that proteins alone are unlikely to have been a beginning. But metals are better at chemistry and they could have been the starting point.

Metals are better at chemistry that what? Chemists? Biochemists? Non-metals?

I also found it somewhat interesting that you posted a 2000-word review, but spent well over 850 of those words setting up how open-minded you are, talking about yourself, and complaining that the author didn’t get to the point.

LOL!

You had asked for comments on the review of Stephen Meyer’s book posted at the blog of Prof Ben McFarland (Seattle Pacific University)

I posted my comments there, but who knows if they’ll see the light of day.

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Ben,

I enjoyed your review of Signature in the Cell. After such a dramatic open – where you go out of your way to show how intellectually disposed you are to the idea – I was anticipating a real challenge to the evidence.

Unfortunately, you didn’t give one.

In fact, I read your review as rather manufactured and petty. I also found it somewhat interesting that you posted a 2000-word review, but spent well over 850 of those words setting up how open-minded you are, talking about yourself, and complaining that the author didn’t get to the point.

What was left of your critique seems trivial. It’s as if there was a need to be as uncharitable as possible in order to make up for the lack of anything resembling a real critique. For instance, on page 248 of the book the author writes “the discovery of 17 variant genetic codes” and then goes on to make the point that this offers rather conclusive evidence that there is not just a single set of codon-amino acid assignments. This conclusion flows directly from the evidence itself. But you return with “These are alternate codes that are exceptions that prove the rule: there is really one code and everything else is a slight variant of it, at most.”

I noted your use of the word “variant” as a descriptive term, and then noticed Dr. Meyer’s use of the word “variant” as the same descriptive term. I was left wondering what the big issue was.
You are of course welcome to characterize them as “alternate codes” if you wish (and I doubt anyone including Dr Meyer would disagree). Yet, it is these small potatoes you described as the author making “frequent distortions of the biochemical facts”. It truly makes one wonder who is offering up the distortions.

In another of your bullet points you write “Later you claim that DNA is information-neutral” and then you immediately agree with him on that claim. Then you write “But then you claim that because of this there can be no bias toward information” and then once again you immediately agree with him. Then the very next thing you do is deride him for the comments you just agreed with, and label it “tunnel vision on DNA”. This is another example of rather poor form on your part, and it characterizes most of what you had to say.

In yet another bullet point you say “The claims that nucleotides are hard to assemble are outdated in one fell swoop by the recent paper”. This is another comment of poor value. The group that synthesized an RNA molecule succeeded only after more than a decade of trying, and succeeded only by means of significant experimenter intervention at repeated steps along the process. Seeming to perhaps appreciate the issues better than you, Robert Shapiro (professor emeritus of chemistry at NYU) commented that “Although as an exercise in chemistry this represents some very elegant work, this has nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth whatsoever”. He went on to say “The chances that blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA is highly unlikely”.

Finally, in your closing remarks regarding Douglas Axe’s work you start by complaining “I’m still a little annoyed that Axe spoke at the recent ASA meeting but no audio was posted for his talk. Do you want scientists like me to believe your work or not?”

Once again, the pettiness comes through loud and clear, and one has to remind themselves that this is supposedly a book review – about a book.

You go on to say that Axe’s work is fine on its own merit, and then say “You’re arguing that a protein must be 150 residues long and made only of amino acids to work. I agree, that’s improbable that something like that would just come together”. But then you demand that Dr. Meyer should have explored the possibilities that metals could have played in the origin of life. You write “All Axe has proven is that proteins alone are unlikely to have been a beginning. But metals are better at chemistry and they could have been the starting point. There is no mention of this possibility anywhere in the 600 pages”

I am wondering why you feel it was incumbent on Dr Meyer to go off into pure conjecture and speculation about metals. I am certain he already had a thesis to put forward and was doing so.

And as a final dig at the author you say “Look, I want to believe, but you have to help my unbelief by demonstrating something, not by just taking the most difficult thing we can find, saying it’s unexplained, and saying “now you have to believe what I say.” No, actually, I don’t.”

This of course, is not just silly; it’s intellectually pathetic as well. First and foremost, there is not a single moment in the book that Dr Meyer says anything even close to resembling what you’ve ascribed to him. The quote you make doesn’t exist, you simply made it up. Not only does the comment not exist, but Dr Meyer went out of his way to say nothing like that, and in fact directly addressed your assertion on virtually every page of the book.

One might wonder…for someone who tries so hard to let it be known he wants to “believe”, what drove you to such low-brow means to show that you don’t.

It comes off looking a lot more like a simple refusal than anything else.

http://arrowthroughthesun.blog.....-cell.html

Much of it was over my head. Any biochemists here or others with thoughts?

Does the “Darwinist stage” have to have empirical evidence behind its conclusions? And what if the central overarching conclusion demands that material is all that there is?

How would we test that? And what do we do with the evidence to the contrary?

I’m what you might call a young bitch at this game, so please do me a favor and tell me what ‘agency’ means to you in this conversation.

I consider all organisms as ‘agents’, so to me they are all players on the Darwinist stage.

To Upright Biped: I’ll leave the God stuff to you.

Really?

Look back at my posts on this thread and find where I posted anything about a God prior to your comment addressing the topic to me. It’s a short thread, it shouldn’t be too much to ask you to cut and paste my comments.

Didn’t find any? Now look through your comments, and tell me again how you’ll leave that topic up to me.

Regarding your list: chance, law, and agency, I dont think Science rejects the supernatural

Let me parse this apart…

“Regarding (my) list: chance, law, and agency…”

You want to make a comment about something not on the list? Then may I suggest at this point it simply becomes your list instead?

…(science) simply ignores it

Yes, science ignores the supernatural…that is why there are so many books on the subject written by scientist and science writers. It’s the same issue with the internet; its full of science blogs ignoring it too. They’re doing the same thing at their national association. They are strenuously ignoring all the time.

As Berlinski once suggested, it’s what Freud referred to as “the return of the repressed”

What would be a nice change is if science would indeed ignore the supernatural – or should I say, if science would stop enforcing its assumptions on the subject for the reasons I’ve already given – and simply returned to the observable evidence without prior demands on what the evidence can and cannot be allowed to say. That is what ID is attempting to do.

It leads to exactly the same place ID is in after 10+ years in the business: nowhere.

Perhaps you noticed Amazon’s Top Ten books for 2009 in the Science category.

However, you seem to have left off the most interesting and productive cause of all: variation + selection. Or did you omit it as a matter of priori ?

You may be new to these issues, so let me simply remind you that “variation + selection” is subsumed by “chance” and “law”. I wasn’t required to mention it separately because it was already included.

And Im writing this real sloooow.

Good. Now try thinking before you start.

- – - – - – -

Graham, let us cut to the chase…

Is there a ubiquitous physical connection between cAMP and glucose, or not?

Regarding your list: chance, law, and agency, I dont think Science rejects the supernatural, as it simply ignores it because it is unproductive. It leads to exactly the same place ID is in after 10+ years in the business: nowhere.

However, you seem to have left off the most interesting and productive cause of all: variation + selection. Or did you omit it as as a matter of priori ?

And Im writing this real sloooow.

I find it hard to believe that you are stymied by the words, contexts, and phrases used in this conversation.

The Popperian in me might guess that you are an old hound at this game.

When Upright Biped refers to ‘agency’, its a code word for God.

To say ‘there is a God’ is a metaphysical assumption. It is meta-physical because it is above and beyond what is physically available to us. There is no physical test for that which is not physical. To say ‘there is not’ a God is a metaphysical assumption as well. The reason is the same – there is no physical test for that which is not physical. It again, is just another metaphysical assumption.

Do you have the capacity to understand this concept? It is, after all, not that hard to understand. If one cannot physically test the existence of something, then to say ‘it is there’ or ‘it is not there’ stems from the same physical test – there isn’t one.

This is why ID does not make such a conclusion, Graham. The conclusion is not appropriate to science, or to scientific investigation. Again, is this simple concept beyond your level of comprehension? There is no physical test that can say there is or is not a God. So ‘Yes God’ or ‘No God’ is a question that can be safely left out of the conversation since (to all rational thinking people) it is understood that there is no physical test to answer the question either way.

You are welcome to have your un-tested (and un-testable) metaphysical assumptions about the answer, as is everyone else.

That however does not mean that we must then assign to chance and law those physical observations that are clearly beyond what chance and physical law can accomplish by any observation within our uniform experience of chance and law. To do so would end in twisted logic that states the following:

Chance and physical law cannot account for X, therefore chance and physical law are the source of X

That level of thinking may suit you, as it apparently does, but there is nothing that requires anyone else to consider it valid.