RE: "Design up to Scratch?" (The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Roberts)

From: Debbie Mann (deborahjmann@insightbb.com)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 10:57:34 EDT

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    I would really like to know - I have asked the question many times and no
    one has given me a sufficient
    answer:

    How does evolution change the number of Chromosomes? I have no problem with
    adaptations between
    species with the same number of Chromosomes. But how does the number get
    increased?
    Advanced creatures have many more than primitive. Absolutely necessary
    functions are
    in completely different places.

    -----Original Message-----
    From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
    Behalf Of Iain Strachan
    Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2003 6:09 AM
    To: ASA
    Subject: Re: "Design up to Scratch?" (The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Roberts)

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Dick Fischer
    To: ASA
    Sent: Friday, April 25, 2003 4:51 PM
    Subject: Re: "Design up to Scratch?" (The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Roberts)

    Lain Strachan wrote:

    Both Behe and I, as trained biochemists, acknowledge the role of chance
    (i.e., in mutations, etc.). We simply argue that chance is not sufficient to
    explain many of the complex processes or structures of living organisms.

    Here is a point where I agree with Lain. I made this point in my book:

    A point of information to the list. My name is Iain not Lain, and I am not
    a trained biochemist, as the above out-of-context quotation from my original
    post seems to indicate. I was quoting Wells, which should have been clear.
    I am a computer scientist, which a specialist area in machine learning,
    neural networks, and (for a brief while) genetic algorithms.

    I am therefore not well qualified to discuss Dick's lengthy quotation from
    his book. I will merely restate that I don't believe Behe was denying God's
    provenance in the appearance of non-irreducibly complex organisms. I think
    the best way of attacking the ID argument is to attack the premise, not the
    conclusion. Richard Dawkins states that to argue that a so-called
    "irreducibly complex" organism could not have evolved in a sequence of small
    steps is simply an argument from ignorance; or the "argument from personal
    incredulity". To my mind this is a much more effective criticism than the
    main thrust of Roberts' paper. I don't happen to agree with it personally,
    but at least it attacks the real scientific issue.

    Iain

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