Posted by:
Tall Man, Short Hair
(
)
Date: March 22, 2017 02:28PM
Okay, my wife and I have returned to the delights of modern indoor plumbing. And thanks to my diligence, there is a plumber out there somewhere still looking for a way to make his boat payment this month.
Let me start with a couple of disclaimers. I am not in any way suggesting with my response here that we should incorporate a theistic creationist model in our public schools. I would not oppose hints at ID in our schools, but I’m also not planting that flag on this hill. Let’s keep out of the weeds as much as possible.
I also want to assure you all that I am sincere in this conversation, and I am actually hoping to have a conversation. I know when it comes to snarkiness I am among the worst offenders here, but I'm pledging to limit that on my part. H2K, I'm open to a pinky swear with you on this if you’re willing. I truly grapple with this issue, and I appreciate the opportunity to do so with our diverse community. And Henry, forgive me that I am going to hijack this to head in a direction a bit different than you perhaps intended.
I also don't know that I'm so much concerned by the concept of evolution as I am by the way it is presented by some of its adherents. There are frequent presentations of such grandiose assurance, that it feels a bit more like a testimony than a presentation of data.
I'm troubled that origin of life questions are often removed from evolution discussions. Our friend "brefots" notes (and I understand) that there has pretty much always been this dividing line between the origin of life and evolution. My cynical self says this must be so, because we can all gather at a table and marvel at Darwin’s finches, but the formation, preservation, and duplication of the first living organisms remain an astoundingly complex and elusive event.
So, recognizing this division, I’m going to ignore it for my initial post but take a look at the way the topic is handled among evolutionists. It may not be part of the study of evolution, but it is frequently addressed by evolutionists.
Take the post above by our friend “anybody:” “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-creationist/For this first discussion, I’m going to limit my remarks to item 8 on this list regarding the complexity of life and how creationists object to its random creation. Here’s a quote from this link:
“As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.”
This seems to me it could also easily be used as an argument for ID. The programmer instructed the program to preserve the order of letters that were correct, removing the essential element of randomness. The initial elements of life had no goal, no guidance, no understanding of what would or would not work. And significantly, the “letters” must also first be assembled in order to become part of the larger whole. And once assembled, the elements of the first living cell had to somehow randomly undertake the process of duplication.
Would most of you agree that this is a terrible, horrible, misleading attempt to dismiss the argument from complexity? Their example required an intelligence to create the program, to decide what the eventual sequence would need to be, and an intelligence to read the results. And most significantly, it left out the other needed elements for a living organism: It didn’t have a randomly-developed way to record the phrase, store the phrase, and it had no printing press to duplicate the phrase. It seems almost intentionally dishonest.
And last summer, several of us got into a bit of a kerfuffle when this video was posted offering a brief explanation for the emergence of life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2IwSgbBymYI believe several of our evolutionists agreed that this was not a great presentation. But this goes to my point. I’ve been out of school for quite a while, but I still see Miller and Urey come up in these conversations as though they represent some significant leap in this study. That dismays me, and appears to be more subterfuge to forward an agenda rather than advancing the truth.
Add to this what appears to be the attempt to marginalize writings and researchers that do not fall in line. When is a Harvard-educated scientist published in peer-reviewed mainstream science journals no longer a scientist? When they provide a research paper to a journal that promotes ID. Examinations of ID are most frequently dismissed not on merit, but merely due to their ID taint. This means that substantial areas of research that are currently not understood have in a certain sense become unfalsifiable. Researchers with virtually identical qualifications can work on the same problems, but if a researcher notes an astonishing depth of design in the design of a cell, her work will likely be discounted if the findings are published in the wrong journal. By the way, it takes about a half a gig of data to track a single life cycle of the world’s simplest cell.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/science/in-a-first-an-entire-organism-is-simulated-by-software.html?_r=1As a species, we’ve spent billions of dollars and devoted untold millions of hours of scientific research time to fathom the emergence of something that science still contends happened absolutely at random. If they ever even get close to an answer, they will be essentially demonstrating what some of us believe: It’s just not possible in the absence of intelligent interaction for life to emerge.
I understand our personal biases. I have repeatedly heard many respond to these questions with a confidence that science will provide the answers. In regards to the specific question about the origin of life, my impression is that the answer keeps getting less and less likely to find a natural source. It troubles me that many embrace this with a religious zeal. They’re quick to arrogantly dismiss the ignorance of creationists while happily stewing the juices of their equal ignorance. “I don’t know, but science will answer this” is a statement of faith on par with “I don’t know, but believe God created.” In regards to the origin of life, there is no real evidence that science is even close to an answer.
The simplest life form we know of has 256 genes, with each having a minimum 1000 base pairs, and no promise that it could ever happen again. This article is several years old, but it demonstrates some of the frustration scientists feel over seeking this answer. And perhaps a bit of an insight why Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA eventually came to embrace “directed panspermia” as the source of life:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/pssst-dont-tell-the-creationists-but-scientists-dont-have-a-clue-how-life-began/Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/22/2017 02:32PM by Tall Man, Short Hair.