Darwin's Doubt, Intelligent Design And Evolution.

[Khandro]

Has anyone watched this film, an interview with Stephen Meyer?

I found it rather compelling, and I thought he answered well the critics who have wished to steer him into the religious standpoint which is not what it's about at all.

[Khandro]

v-e; ref. //the hypothesis that it was created through the symbiotic merging of two simpler single cells//
Yes, I think too think that has a familiar ring to it, and perhaps they did, but the question I ponder is WHY would they want to do that?

[jomifl]

/ WHY would they want to do that? /
I expect that they read up on the pros and cons of merging set up a committee and after due deliberation took a vote and got on with it.
Alternatively no 'will, was involved, it was just an inevitable accident like most things that happen. I dare say many great works of art have a greater accidental content than the creator artist would like to admit.

[Khandro]

^^ Sort of, like two Volkswagens crashing into each other and becoming a Mercedes?

[beso]

The origin of the eukyote could easily start as the pre-mitochondrion simply being a parasite and the pair building symbiosis over millions of generations.

[beso]

Chance mergers abound in our genome. Many of them probably started as infection. A considerable part of the DNA of most organisms comes directly from viruses.

The genes that allow cells in multicellular organisms to merge into larger structures are basically the same as the genes that viruses use to puncture cell walls as they invade.

[beso]

khandro //Sort of, like two Volkswagens crashing into each other and becoming a Mercedes?//

No. More like a self-replicating bicycle crashing into a self-replicating bus and some of its structures slowly changing into a chain driven door opener over a million generations.

[beso]

jomifl //I dare say many great works of art have a greater accidental content than the creator artist would like to admit.//

An excellent example. Jackson Pollock's works are often described as looking like he vomited on them. Some believe he did.

Enter Millie Brown who vomits tinted "soy milk" onto canvas.

(I don't know if this was her original intention but I have tasted soy milk and could well imagine it happening spontaneously.)

[jomifl]

Beso, I too have tasted soy 'milk' and can understand Millie's reaction to it, I don't think strawberry, blackcurrant, or pistachio would improve it much. Was she just too far from a lavatory?

[vetuste_ennemi]

I'm surprised that someone as broadly read as Khandro sees unaware that he is repeating the discredited arguments from design and first causes. You didn't get your two cars colliding analogy from Behe's book by any chance, did you, Khandro? It seems remarkably like a Fred Hoyle ("Could a tornado in a scrap-yard produce a Boeing?") quotation to me. This is a staple of creationist literature. Beso's comment was apposite and explains why the analogy between living things and machines is weak: living things can replicate and adapt, machines can't. If there's a fault in the braking system or suspension in one model of car there's nothing the car can do about it; the fault will be eliminated by the human designer in the next "generation" of that model. If there's a fault in the design of a living organism, then the organism itself will have to adapt to overcome the disadvantage, or fail in the attempt and die. That is why living things look botched and tinkered with (Dawkin's classic example is the laryngeal nerve): natural selection and adaptation cannot "go back to the drawing-board"; they must work with what they've got. This is one of the strongest confirmations of evolutionary theory.

[Khandro]

v_e; The VW - Merc is entirely my invention and not a good one I admit, because of course both VWs are already fully operating systems, perhaps it would have been more apposite had I said 2 bricks colliding and producing an automobile (or at least a windscreen wiper).

Regarding vomiting on artworks; Having worked late into the night yesterday on a painting before retiring, and the looking at the results of my labours this morning, I thing it may have been better had I done so.

[vetuste_ennemi]

I withdraw my suggestion of plagiarism, Khandro, and thank you for an insight into the tortured soul of the artist. I would like to say I feel your pain, but I don't.

[Hypognosis]

@vetuste_ennemi
Re abiogenesis: Human Universe 3 (last night) mentions the eukaryotic cell and the hypothesis that it was created through the symbiotic merging of two simpler single cells. Second time I've come across this idea recently.
15:00 Wed 22nd Oct 2014

Prof. Cox managed to do that without mentioning mitochondria but I knew this was what the merger was alluding to. I forget whether I learned this at uni or in subsequent years.

Incidentally, chloroplasts are also self-replicating and are thought to be a captured symbiotic lifeform.

To my mind, the collision was between a cell which had the full set of enzymes for respiration (sugar + oxygen + ADP -> ATP + CO2 + H2O) but they were floating loose on the cytoplasm and thus inefficient. The other was a better packed - thus more efficient - set of similar enzymes. By replicating faster than the big cell could 'eat' them, the mitochondria could contiue to exist.
The big cell thrived from faster metabolism and would eventually inactivate/mutate the respiration genes it no longer needed.

Mitochondrial DNA may have advanced since the time of the merger.

An analogy would be a rolling chassis, powered by elastic bands, crashing into an engine factory, capturing an engine and morphing the bands into something else.

[Hypognosis]

^^^ more things than are dreamed of in philosophies existant in 1602.

Mostly religions, in other words. This quote is pre-'modern science', pre-Newton, even. It's always amusing to see the expression used by theists to hint that scientists lack the imagination to deal with spritual stuff (and/or 'woo').

[jomifl]

/It's always amusing to see the expression used by theists to hint that scientists lack the imagination to deal with spritual stuff /
Agreed Hypo, There are more ways to be creative than most 'creative' people can begin to imagine.

[vetuste_ennemi]

Thanks for your comment, by the way, Hypognosis.

[Khandro]

There appears to be little doubt that some scientists are in fact highly creative, particularly when it comes to inventing risible theories about how conscious life could have appeared from inorganic matter.

[beso]

I don't understand why theist find it so difficult to accept the rise of conscious life from inorganic matter.

After all they happily accept that a the most complex thing in the Universe simply appeared fully formed from nothing at all.

Their hypothesis has neither the tornado nor the junkyard.

[jomifl]

Khandro, depending on your understanding of the meaning of the word 'conscious' you probably don't need to use it with reference to primitive life forms since they wouldn't have had a brain in which thoughts could take up residence. :o)

[jim360]

Some of your analogies and replies in this thread, along with all that awful shifting of your position, has been pretty risible frankly. Frankly you are in no position whatever to comment on theories that you evidently don't understand nearly as well as you think. It seems pretty clear that you don't even understand what Stephen Meyer's position is!

[jomifl]

Beso, nice one...unless you have faith....