Posted: Aug 21, 2017 5:07 pm
Calilasseia wrote:
This is such a blatantly duplicitous reply, that it's barely worth dignifying with a response. But in the interests of rigour, I'll provide one. Quite simply, if the data says that the authors have jumped to incorrect conclusions, then that is the criterion for rejection. Which is an essential part of those scholarly standards you're mendaciously seeking to dismiss, with this egregious misrepresentation of peer review as being in any way "symmetric" with apologetic fabrication.
In case you hadn't worked this out, this is the whole point of presenting scientific papers - so that others familiar with the proper treatment of data can spot and report errors to be corrected. Indeed, examples of reasons for rejection of papers have been documented here on this forum in the past, as written by scientists given the task of peer reviewing material.
I think you have a naive and idealistic view of the peer review process. It works in some cases, where the reviewers have the time to reproduce the findings, but more often than not bad papers - even fraudulent ones - get published:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn ... bly-wrong/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/how ... rent-true/
https://theconversation.com/scientific- ... ppen-13948
A more useful criterion is whether the findings are validated in further research and the paper is cited accordingly. Unless this happens, scientific papers should only be regarded as tenatatively pointing to a possible conclusion that may be overturned.
Actually, it doesn't even do that. It simply acts as a high pass filter for the functions that work.
Well, in that case, it merely lets the working functions continue into the next generation. It doesn't produce them.
But I was, of course, referring to the evolutionary process in its entirety, including mutation and neutral drift, when presenting my remarks, as those who paid attention in science classes readily understand. Indeed, it won't take the diligent long to see me referring in the past here, to natural selection as a high-pass filter.
And Darwin was insistent that variation is observed to only modify already existing functions. He then speculated, as with his famous example of the swimbladder and the lung, that successive modifications over time could produce a new function or organ.
And you think I didn't already know this? Ha ha ha ha ha. Read the above and weep.
It wasn't my first thought.
Those early aircraft attempts I posted look a hell of a lot like blind experimentation. Indeed, quite a few of them were the result of efforts by people lacking any specialist understanding of fluid dynamics, even as the subject existed back in the 1900s or earlier. For that matter, the advent of successful aircraft, was one of the developments propelling a more modern understanding of that discipline. Do you think anyone with even a circa 1900s understanding of fluid dynamics, would have tried using exposed paddle wheels as a propulsion system for an aircraft?
Do you have any example of how engineering is practised today using no thought process or foresight whatsoever?
However, Otto Lilienthal, who set out from the beginning to understand aerodynamic concepts, enjoyed successes with towed gliders and prototype hang gliders nearly two decades before the Wright Brothers produced a working powered aircraft. His gliders, thankfully thoroughly documented, start to look like an evolutionary series when placed in chronological order. The Otto Lilienthal Museum contains both extensive original documentation from Lilienthal's own pen, and scale model replicas thereof.
Well, that's nice to know. Some technological leaps may have been accidental - I can think of beer as a case in which bread and yeast fermented with water to give alcohol. That wasn't designed or planned. However, I seriously doubt that the steam engine - the machine that transformed industry - just came about by a process of mindlessly experimenting with steam and pistons.
Ahem, I'll point you at Astyanax mexicanus and other blind cave fishes. Which readily discarded functioning eyes the moment they ceased to be of use. In the case of A. mexicanus, however, eye-loss populations of cave dwelling members of the species, upon finding themselves in a karst window, reacquired functional eyes. I've covered the scientific papers in some detail in the past. In the meantime, you can fire up this scientific paper, go to page 8572, and see the step by step stages of building an eye over time from simpler antecedent structures.
Well, that kind of implies that the organism itself is able to switch off and then switch back on its own visual apparatus. There is a purpose or intent about this. In fact, the field of "niche construction", whereby organisms select their own environment and even variations, brings purpose back into the evolutionary process as it makes organisms active subject and not passive objects.
And those signatures are what, precisely? Provide in detail, a breakdown of the differences between stones shaped by natural erosion, and stones shaped by human activity. I'll have fun watching the palaeontologists gather round and observe.
That's what palaentologists do. They look for evidence of design in the way stones have been altered or whether fires have been deliberately started by design by primitive humans. It is not an exact science but it is an inferential science with methods.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ ... 6/20150164
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... -55335180/
Well that's the assertion being tested here, isn't it? Namely, that entities pursuing a goal with intent, purportedly produce observational data that are distinguishable from the data generated by natural processes. This is the central creationist assertion that I'm asking you to address. If this assertion is true, then it should be possible to state the nature of those distinguishing features, both by reference to example and via deduction from first principles. Can you do this?
It is a qualitative judgment. Design aims at perfection, optimal performance and efficiency whereas non-design, if it works at all, does not. That is how I would distinguish between the two. Some features in biology look very much like they have been designed by an intelligence. Indeed, Richard Dawkins accepts that this is the distinctive characteristic of living organisms.
"Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose."
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quot ... 26696.html
This assumes in advance that the process either possesses goal-oriented sentience, or was produced by one. We have zero data telling us this.
Illusion implies that something intelligent is illuding us.