RE: Blood clotting and IC'ness?

From: Nelson Alonso (nalonso@megatribe.com)
Date: Mon Sep 18 2000 - 12:22:27 EDT

  • Next message: Bertvan@aol.com: "fear of the religious implications of design"

    << Sure. But in the case of IC that's what you have to show. We all agree
    that
    design can sometimes be infered quite reliably. IC does not eliminate
    natural
    processes as a cause, it claims that it does but it has not shown this. It
    does not even show that ID is a plausible and useful alternative.
    You seem to overestimate the power of ID and IC. Perhaps that's caused by
    the
    unsupported claims like the ones you make above?

    Nelson:
    Can you show how what I say above is not supported? You have to first
    support your claim that IC systems can evolve. You cannot evolve something
    that is totally ineffective below the sum of it's parts. >>

    FMA:
    You are trying to switch the burden of proof again.

    Nelson:
    No, the burden was to produce a system that cannot arise via chance and
    natural selection. >>

    FMA:
    Not the burden of proof is to show that an IC system cannot arrise through
    chance and natural selection.

    Nelson:
    Thats exactly what I said above. You repeated my statement almost verbatim.

    FMA:
    And even if it could, this would not prove
    design merely disprove Darwinian evolution as a mechanism here.

    Nelson:
    Nope, it also shows that intelligent agency is needed to produce these
    systems, since we observe them producing these systems, and they can only be
    built by adding multiple parts together with foresight.

    Nelson:
     There can be no functional precursor if you cannot reduce

    << an irreducible system since the you cannot show an effective precursor.
    Now
    if you want to say "it could have evolved" you have to give me a pathway to
    work with. I have proposed my pathway, namely intelligent design.
    >>

    FMA:
    That's not a pathway. It's a place holder for ignorance. I have shown how an
    IC system could arise naturally (Robison). Others include

    Nelson:
    Robison failed to show how a natural pathway could make an IC system. Sigh,
    here we go again with more links.

    Terry Gray

    Nelson:
    Terry Gray talked about Hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is _not_ an irreducibly
    complex system. I can remove two of it's alpha beta parts and it will still
    be hemoglobin. I can even reduce the function of the entire system to the
    heme.

    <snip>

    Lindsay

    "The above exchange happened in 1997. As of 1999, Behe has simply avoided
    the
    goalposts. I do not know of a public acknowledgement that
    some of his examples, such as clotting have been convincingly explained.

    Nelson:
    Because it hasn't been explained.

    Link Quote:
    Instead, in September 1999 he said "The point in dispute is whether natural
    selection can produce major innovations." But surely his book holds up the
    immune system as a major innovation, and as of 1998 it was no longer
    disputable that evolution could have caused that. "

    Nelson:
    Lets take a look:

    "Rebuttal of Example: Cilia and Flagella

    Although Behe describes these on pages 59-72, it isn't clear exactly what
    the
    irreducible systems are, and why they can't be reduced.

    Suppose we took flagellin, which in E. coli K-12 is a chain of 497 amino
    acids. What if we chop out a third of those? If the "system" is irreducible
    then removing these parts should make it stop functioning. But that has been
    done, and the flagellum still worked fine [1]. So is this reduced system
    Irreducible? Apparently we don't have a good way to know, since the method
    applied to the original system gave a wrong answer.

    Nelson:
    Behe made it _extremely_ clear which parts make up the IC flagellum. Namely
    the stator, the propeller, and the rotor,etc. Ken Miller and Ian Musgrave
    both conceded these parts to be IC.

    Quote:
    Flagellin is also used for "active transport" inside cells, but a cutdown
    version with 183 aminos will do that [2]. This implies that there was some
    earlier molecule that was only used for transportation. Evolution replaced
    that molecule with flagellin, and flagellin was then co-opted into its
    flagella
    role because it was lying around.

    Nelson:
    Once again, another "just so" story that doesn't reduce the actual parts of
    the flagellum at all. Note the "just lying around" comment. Active
    transports lie causally downstream from the flagellum, so this is completely
    ad hoc.

    Quote:
    So, there is evidence suggesting evolutionary scenarios leading to a
    flagella.

    Nelson:
    This is hilarious, she gave no such thing! The rest of the article gives the
    same kind of handwaving and "just so" stortelling. Remember that Darwinian
    evolution demands "physical precursors" not imaginary stories. I am
    interested in history and science, not philosophy. So far , no paper, not
    one experiment, not one theoretically plausible scenario that is falsifiable
    and supported by the evidence, has been given for any IC system.



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