ID Exposed: Bill O’Reilly: Right for once, admits that ID is religious

TomS Wrote:

if some sort of language-ID advocate would insist on teaching in K-12 languages classes that “a deity created language”?

You mean they didn’t? :-)

William, you earlier claimed to treat everyone with respect. However, I perceive that you are not treating the readers of PT with intellectual honesty, and therefore you are not treating us with respect. IOW, your posts seem design to obfuscate rather than enlighten.

William Brookfield, ICON-RIDS Wrote:

… Given say, the case of the peppered moth. According to the traditional story, the industrial revolution soot-ed (darkened) the landscape and subsequently bumped and shifted the survivable niche for peppered moths.

What do you mean, “bumped”? There is an awful lot more to it than that, and sicne it was a gradual process rather than a sudden one, how can the word “bumped” in any way be appropriate?

The result was that lighter moths were being decimated(randomized).

They were not being randomised, they were being eaten by birds more often than their darker relatives. This is a distinctly non-random process.

You seem to be missing one of the central points of NS, too. Every species known produces more offspring in a generation than the available resources are able to sustain. For peppered moths, this means that, every year, regardless of tree-trunk colour, thousands or millions of moths will die. NS is a process by which the survivors are selected, based n their inherant, heritable traits.

The darkening of the tree trunks did not mean that more moths died than in preceding decades - it meant that the lighter coloured moths were selectively preyed upon.

luckily, the species included a darker variation that could indeed survive in the new environment.

You attribute this to luck, rather than design? But I thought you were an adherent of ID? Oh, maybe you are conceding that NS has been amply demonstrated to occur.

Were this not the case the species could have been destroyed(randomized).

Again, this would not have been random. A species that is unable to survive will go extinct.

The new environment was a blow from which the species was (in this case) able to recover.

No, it wasn’t. It didn’t happen overnight, it took 2 or 3 decades. Within this time, the moth population gradually adapted.

The “blow” or “bump” could however, have been harder. The earth could have been hit with an asteroid, in which case the peppered moth species would need a variant that was not darker but perhaps instead asbestos-like and fireproof.

With respect, sir, you are talking bollocks.

An asteroid impact will cause global cooling. This is well-documented.

The buffeting that species take from a changing environment is not an evolutionary positive but is instead a dangerous devolutionary negative.

Your positive and negative terminology is entirely superfluous. We’re talking about biological entities here, not electricity. IOW, stuff happens. Deal with it.

While natural selective destruction can indeed ruthlessly “specify” a survivable or optimum variant from a pre-existing probabilistic genetic “library,”

No, not just “can”, it always does. It is not always the most significant mechanism of evolution. But, hey, you’ve read about modern evolutionary theory (MET), haven’t you, so you already know that, right?

it is no position, given its function, to produce new species nor their attendant variational options (new genetic libraries).

Oh, maybe you haven’t actually got the slightest clue what you’re talking about after all.

NS acts on existing variation.

RM is one of several mechanisms by which variation arises.

“Filtration” is not the same as “origination.”

You’re right. They’re spelt differently. Now, what does this have to do with NS?

“Origination” requires the development of new specifications not the mere filtration of old specifications (old genetic libraries).

But a species doesn’t have a manual. There is no single specification. Each species is a collection of many individuals, all of which differ from one another.

Given that any particular species contains much inherent variation, where does your concept of specification have any relevance at all?

Additionally, small changes in the sequence or timing of the expression of the genes involved in embryonic patterning can lead to large changes in morphology. Where does that leave your “specification”?

William Brookfield, ICON-RIDS Wrote:

For example, as I see it dogs presently exist in a symbiotic relationship with humans.

I think that’s stretching the definition of “symbiotic”.

Numerous breeds that would not survive in the wild

(1) all “breeds” of dog are artificial. They were created through artificial selection. And look how much variation has accumulated in the mere 10,000 years (or whatever, but it is not a long time) since dogs were domesticated.

(2) You claim they would not survive “in the wild”, but do you have any evidence to support this assertion?

… If humans were to disappear from the world “Natural Selection’ would once again destroy all of the suboptimal breeds,

True, but how is this different from the definition of NS that Dawkins uses?

reducing dogs to a core ancestral wolf type that can survive in the wild (without humans).

You cannot know this. It is probable that the present variety of dog breeds would decrease in number, but what is most likely is that what today are “dogs” would eventually form a number of new species, all of which are as closely related to one another as today’s dogs are to modern wolves.

However, while this may be the likely scenario, it is not by any means the only possible one.

With the natural selective destruction of say, the “poodle” comes the destruction of all the DNA coding (the information) contained in the poodle and the destruction of its reproductive (information carrying ) capacity.

Yet the poodle is still the same species as all the other dogs. The information is not lost, it will simply not be expressed, since just about all of it exists in other breeds of dog.

It is only through inbreeding (i.e. artificial selection) that different breeds show their pecular characteristics.

This is one of the core arguments in TOOS, which you obviously either did not read or have not understood. Darwin dealt more with pigeons than with dogs, but the points are clear.

In this manner natural selection acts to reduce the information carrying capacity of the dog species as a whole.

Except for the fact that it doesn’t.

A mogrel will show very few of the pecular characteristics of its parents, but will still have half the DNA of each, trasmitted either uncorrupted or with a few additional mutations (in your parlance, additional information).

If the DNA information that codes for poodles is to be carried forward at all, it must now squeeze through the only remaining “dog channel” still open, the ancestral wolf.

No. Poodles could be bred from any existing dog breed. It would take many generations, but it could be done.

Go and learn something about genetics.

As I see it “information” refers to the realization of a specific event(s) within a background set of live possibilities – not dead dogs.

Fortunately for the rest of us, we don’t have to work with it the way you see it. You are just talking nonsense, betraying a severe ignorance of both evolutionary theory and animal husbandry.

Keeping a pure breed requires active intervention. You can’t just breed poodles and expect them to stay that way. They will vary intrinsically, and they will cross with other breeds.

The destruction of information carriers (such as poodles) does not increase information as I see it but merely narrows the channel capacity.

But even if all poodles were destroyed, the information still exists in the genomes of other dogs.

The bottom line is that the (natural selective) destruction of channel capacity is not the same thing as the production of new information – in which channel capacity is necessarily maintained.

In what way is “channel capacity” relevant to biological evolution?

Besides, as others have pointed out, NS does not create new information, that is mainly done by mutation. It is the combination that results in adaptation.

The “genetic library” that I talk about is the set of gradualistically accessible variations available to any given species.

And as long as there are dogs, “Poodle” will be an accessible variation. Your library of dog genes still exists within all other dogs.

Perhaps many here believe that this library is infinite (we are all but variation of the original reproducing organism?)and that new information is not needed. The question for me is, how to add genuinely new information to the existing library or how to add a new species with its new attendant library of variations.

But this is trivial, not a problem.

Modern evolutionary theory (MET) has a set of mechanisms for doing just that.

Have you actually ever read a college-level biology text? Or how about any of the many, many wonderful popular-science books that explain, in layman’s terms, how evolution operates?

Torbjorn, you are right. I got lulled into using the woolly definition of information. I was not using it in its technical, unambiguous sense.