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Post by Armand Tanzarian on Sept 8, 2009 2:04:58 GMT -5
www.uncommondescent.com/Just to show you where they stand, their logo is a flagellum. Please ignore the fact we have a pretty good hypothesis for the flagellum's evolutionary path.
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Post by Admiral Lithp on Sept 8, 2009 3:39:52 GMT -5
It doesn't matter. They can always claim that SOMETHING is irreducibly complex.
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Post by Hades on Sept 8, 2009 3:49:25 GMT -5
It doesn't matter. They can always claim that SOMETHING is irreducibly complex. What are these unimaginably small vibrating strings of String Theory made of? HAH! You can't tell me. Obviously there's a god. |
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Post by Undecided on Sept 11, 2009 3:36:19 GMT -5
Analysis of forensic evidence of design has always started with the mechanisms which allow things to be designed by humans, i.e., our common-sense understanding of design has always been attached to the ways we think it is possible for something to be designed. My criticism is philosophical: my counterexample is forgery. We have developed the methods to forge systems which would have appeared 'natural' to persons preceding us. Take, for example, forged DNA. A mere 20 years ago, it would have been unthinkable in forensics that somebody could realistically forge DNA. Examples like these (which are common throughout history) mean that what we can call human-designed is always in a state of flux, which means that any objective definition of "design" is toast, including irreducible complexity (which does not seem to apply to anything human-designed besides machines, by the way).
To make it simpler: suppose I hid my secret base in a giant well-made, natural-looking artificial stone, so if I didn't have the stone, it wouldn't be secret, and if I didn't have the base, it wouldn't be a base. Would Plato have ascribed it a natural or artificial cause? Surely not artificial, because Plato would not have had the tools to test whether the stone was artificial, so he would have ascribed to it, wrongly, a natural cause. However, if I were to show Plato several nice-looking, spherically-shaped mineral samples which formed naturally (in the sense that no human designed it) in some meteorite, he may, again incorrectly, find a human cause and a purpose where none exists. This little thought-experiment (along with similar experiments and cognitive bias tests which could actually be performed) shows that the inference of design is dependent on temporal context, and that even if so-called "irreducible complexity" is shown, the idea does not necessarily correlate to any well-defined concept of design.
ID proponents claim that their conclusion of design as irreducible complexity is based on a large body of evidence concerning human design. But did they ever check to account for the change in beliefs about human design in the passage of time? Real natural science does not suffer from this problem: new established theories ought always to explain the evidence which supported the old ones, often including them as approximations. ID's irreducible complexity is meaningless without the intuitive property of "design" to support it, and since concepts of design from different contexts are incompatible, any real meaning to ID-based analysis is itself elusive.
It's early in the morning, so this little essay needs a good shakedown.
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Post by John E on Sept 11, 2009 11:04:40 GMT -5
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Post by Tiger on Sept 11, 2009 17:52:03 GMT -5
Why did they choose that specific picture?
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Post by gotpwnt on Sept 23, 2009 15:49:02 GMT -5
Why did they choose that specific picture? I think it's because the flagellum is supposed to be irre dunceibly complex. No I did not misspell that word.  Well maybe I did, but who cares? Doesn't change the fact the IC is absolute garbage.  |
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