That is incorrect. The argument is that the BF needs all its parts to function. To provide that evolution alone produced it, it must be shown by step by step increments that would be beneficial to the organism enough to be selected for and function accordingly.
Right, and that only matters because it seems improbable that evolution could produce it. That's the entire point of these arguments - "it could not have evolved, therefore we need a designer".
This reads nonsensical, I have no idea what you are saying.
The point is, we have a functional model of how things work in almost all cases. It has beautiful explanatory and predictive power, and we have found evidence for it throughout all branches of life. Now, we come to something where we're not sure if the model applies. Once we have a model like this, though, we need to go about demonstrating that the model
doesn't apply, not the other way around.
If I wanted to claim that Pluto had the mass of a grape and was being held in orbit supernaturally, I'd think you'd ask for evidence for that claim. I mean, sure, we haven't
demonstrated that Newtonian mechanics apply to it, but the fact that Newtonian mechanics seem to apply to, well, just about every other macro object in the universe offers a strong indication that Pluto
probably follows Newtonian mechanics. Similarly, the fact that the pattern we see throughout everything in nature indicates design gives us pretty good grounds to assume that these complex cellular pathways are evolved. And, of course, as our knowledge increases, the various icons of "irreducible complexity" keep on falling to pieces as we learn they could have evolved and occasionally how they did. The argument you keep appealing to is the
exact same argument used in the 1800s to propose that the eye couldn't have evolved. At this point, if you want to overthrow the paradigm, it's on you to determine that it couldn't have evolved, just like it'd be on you to demonstrate that Pluto somehow has a different gravitational constant. A good place to start would be showing that (in the case of cellular components - for macrostructures, methods tend to be a little different) the proteins expressed have no homology with other structures that are useful for the organism.
When something is speculative and unable to be tested it is a sure-fire argument begging the question.
The model, and here's the key thing that makes it scientific, makes
numerous testable predictions about what we should see in this case. And these predictions have, thus far, been
largely confirmed by a secondary paper by Matzke and Pallen in 2006. And the explanatory framework of evolution gives us a way to understand how it evolved. It's by no means a proven fact - it could be that an alternative model fits the evidence we have better. But keep in mind that we're dealing with a
really difficult question ("How did a highly complex microscopic machine evolve?" is one of the hardest questions you're going to answer in evolution), and we still have a pretty good idea of how it works, and it still shows that a supernatural explanation is
unnecessary.
I think you have a misunderstanding of what they are doing. They are going top down and goal to start to explore biological systems.
I don't know why you would think that I think this guy denies common descent. Why would you think that?
Because you're citing his field of research as though it was evidence of intelligent design. I think you're misinterpreting his field of research, and I think you'll find that almost nobody in that field rejects evolution or holds to intelligent design. You're from citing research in advanced technical fields as support for your claims when the researchers in that field
clearly disagree with you. This "top down" thing? So what? What implication does that have for evolution? That it was designed from the top down? You could describe
any system in nature as designed "from the top down" using engineering terms. That does not mean that they actually
were designed from the top down! Your argument makes no sense.
Again you are not getting it. Evolution is not being tested as a whole. There is plenty of evidence for evolution.
See, here you come
really close to getting it. Yes, evolution as a whole is not being tested when we talk about the flagellum. We're past the point where that's a particularly useful thing to do. If we encounter something which clearly runs afoul of the theory, like a blue-blooded biped with hair and mammary glands, or a horse with avian wings, or even something like the bacterial flagellum but with no homologous proteins, then we can go back and say, "Hey, wait a minute, this doesn't fit the model". But cdesign proponentsists never point to something that blows up the tree of life. Because they can't. Instead, they look at a complex biological system, say "that couldn't have evolved", and then when
real scientists prove them wrong, they move on to the
next complex biological system! We done this dance a dozen times, and while I will admit that the increases in knowledge that are gleaned from evo-devo are interesting and these are probably things we would explore anyways for the sake of knowledge, the fact that we still have to waste time addressing points made by dishonest cretins like Sternberg and Wells is rather unfortunate.
Although, I think the list above is baloney.
I am not an expert. I welcome any expert or you to point out what on that list would not be a viable falsification for common descent and the tree of life.
It is the speculative argument without evidence that the BF could arise by evolution alone.
No. It's "speculative" that it
did arise by evolution alone (in the same way that it's "speculative" that Pluto ever has or ever will ever complete a full orbit of the Sun). The fact that a functional model exists shows that it definitely
could arise by evolution alone.
The issue with the appearance of to borrow your word, very deliberate design is not that people stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion, it is that there has been no evidence that explains its existence.
You don't see the double standard here? "There's no evidence that explains the existence of such an illusion"?
There's no evidence that explains such a design! There is
no evidence pointing to a designer here beyond "this looks designed therefore there must have been a designer". Assuming we know nothing about the natural world, your proposed explanation puts us at exactly the same place as Dawkins's.
...But of course, there
is evidence that explains the existence of such an illusion. Evolution has long been understood as a form of "natural design". Selection pressures and the Red Queen Dilemma will necessarily lead to organisms that are very well adapted to their niche. If only the most aerodynamic birds can survive competition with other birds in the sky, this will lead to an evolutionary pathway which gradually produces more and more aerodynamic birds, to the point where the aerodynamics of the wing seem "designed". Evolution produces
countless things which, to various people, appear "designed". Does the human eye seem "designed" to you? It seemed designed to Paley. How about the bombardier beetle's caustic spray? Bert Thompson and Brad Harrub thought it was designed. Jonathan M. on Evolution News And Views thought that bacterial chemotaxis was designed (despite there already being
extensive research explaining how bacterial chemotaxis evolved!).
The fact that I can bring up these examples shows quite clearly that there
is evidence for such an illusion, and that there's a viable explanation for such an illusion: evolution leads to not just the need for ever-increasing potency in biological systems, but also to the
streamlining of such systems, in such a way that it seems designed. This has been well-understood ever since Darwin first published "On The Origin Of Species" and showed that Paley's belief in the design of the human eye was demonstrably wrong. Or, illusory, if you will. Darwin
explicitly addressed this illusion in his book, and I think you might know about that passage, because it's one of the ones creationists love to quote-mine, and it keeps coming up.
It's the bit about the evolution of the eye being absurd in the highest degree.
Basically, Paley was wrong about the eye. Harrub was wrong about the bombardier beetle. Jonathan M was wrong about chemotaxis. All of these people fell prey to an
illusion of design. How can you reasonably say that the design you see in a cell, or the design Behe sees in the bacterial flagellum, is not a similar illusion?
