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Because I believe it's origin, and the origin of everything here, was supernatural. I'm distinguishing origins from current processes. That is, I believe the processes were originally designed and have since run themselves. Kind of like the watchmaker described by Newton and Descartes. Does God still intervene? Yes, we call such events "answered prayers", "miracles", etc.Why can't the Sun be a product of natural processes just like weather, planetary orbits, and volcanoes?
I think you bring up a good point: how involved is God with the everyday running of the natural world? There are creationists who go as far as quoting Colossians 1:17 to claim that Jesus holds every atom together.I'm not sure we're reading the same Bible. In the Bible I read, God is described as forming each person in the womb, as giving animals their food daily, as sending clouds and rain, as spreading the snow like wool and frost like ashes, and as making plants grow. As Psalm 104 puts it,
All of them wait for You
to give them their food at the right time.
they gather it;
when You open Your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.
When You hide Your face,
they are terrified;
when You take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
When You send Your breath,
they are created,
and You renew the face of the earth.
It's a basically question of levels of abstraction and emergence. If you studied physics you'll know about Ken Wilson (Nobel Prize 1982) of renormalization group fame, who showed that physics operates at a hierarchy of scales, each higher scale abstracted from the one below. Properties of a lower level can give rise to novel emergent properties at the higher level. For example, a water molecule isn't wet, wetness is a novel emergent property of the interactions of many water molecules. The same principle applies in fields of science - chemistry is based on physics, but can be studied without a detailed knowledge of the underlying physics by applying the emergent rules, biology is built on chemistry, but has its own behaviours & properties emergent from and abstracted from it. You don't need to understand the details of the layer below to do useful work at the higher level - so you can study ocean waves & turbulent flow without knowing the physics of individual water molecules.
Emergence means that the lower layer provides a facilitating substrate, a support for functionally unrelated patterns of activity; Conway's Game of Life is a good example - a static grid of binary (black/white, on/off, active/inactive, 'alive'/'dead') cells whose state is determined very simply by the immediately neighboring cells. The cells themselves aren't interesting, and the simple rules are the same for every cell, but depending on the initial pattern of cell states, interesting patterns of activity can occur when the rules are applied repeatedly over the grid. These patterns are not just interesting oddities, they can do stuff - for example one pattern can act as a Universal Turing Machine, capable, in principle, of computing anything computable; another pattern can self-replicate like a kind of primitive digital proto-life; yet another can emulate Game of Life itself:However, as you may have noticed, the GOL self-replicator is huge, extremely improbable to appear by random generation (especially as there is no selection in GOL) , due to the very restricted degrees of freedom in the interaction of the system - 2 dimensions, binary cells, and trivially simple relational rules. So achieving the necessary complexity takes huge numbers of them. But the rules and interactions of physics have vastly more degrees of freedom, giving chemistry a much wider range and complexity of emergent behaviours, and so-on, so achieving the complexity of a self replicator requires fewer interacting elements at the level of chemistry, making it far less improbable to arise as a result of cumulative random processes (with selection).
It is possible to conceive of simple replicators that depend on particular properties of organic chemicals - e.g. a variety of similar chemicals like the nitrogenous bases of RNA, that, in the right environment, will polymerize into short chains where each will attract a complementary base that will bind to its neighbor and form a complementary chain. If the environment changes, the complementary chain might separate from its template and attract its own set of complementary bases to form a copy of the original chain, and so on. Current hypothetical models of abiogenesis are far more sophisticated than this, but it highlights the potential role of environmental variation affecting the patterns of interaction of the molecules.
But particular properties of chemicals don't lead to sexuality, it's an emergent property of biology under natural selection; chemistry is the underlying functional substrate that makes the patterns of activity of biological systems possible, and the patterns of activity of biological systems can lead to the emergence of sexuality. Quite different levels of abstraction.
Ultimately, it's the energy gradients in the system that enable or drive the interactions at each level. Systems tend towards equilibrium, maximising entropy by energy dissipation, and it may not be a coincidence that energy dissipation is proportional to the complexity of the dissipating activity.
Another factor in the generation of complexity of living systems is self-organisation and self-assembly. This isn't a directed effect, but like crystal growth, it's a function of simple structural interactions between atoms or molecules. Crystallising water can produce symmetrical geometric shapes; polar organic molecules in solution, e.g. phospholipids, can produce membranes as their hydrophilic ends are mutually attracted, as are their hydrophilic ends, and they clump together. Such lipid membranes can spontaneously curve into a spherical bubbles - vesicles or liposomes.
I think you bring up a good point: how involved is God with the everyday running of the natural world? There are creationists who go as far as quoting Colossians 1:17 to claim that Jesus holds every atom together.
Maybe they're right (how would I know?), but I don't go that far. My background is physics, specifically acoustics, and the predictability of my field makes the universe look more like a creation that was set in motion and let go to run.
But that's the inanimate universe.
I agree with your that Psalm 104 doesn't sound like that. I know he's involved daily in my life, and also in the lives of other people around me. And Jesus says in Mt 6 that God feeds the birds. It sounds like he's involved daily in the lives of every living thing.
If that's so why are we talking about a person born in 1743?
I don't doubt it, but that was the exception not the rule:
"Yockey [7] and Wickens [5] develop the same distinction [as Orgel], explaining that “order” is a statistical concept referring to regularity such as might characterize a series of digits in a number, or the ions of an inorganic crystal. On the other hand, “organization” refers to physical systems and the specific set of spatio-temporal and functional relationships among their parts.
Yockey and Wicke ns note that informational macromolecules have a low degree of order but a high degree of specified complexity. In short, the redundant order of crystals cannot give rise to specified complexity of the kind or magnitude found in biological organization; attempts to relate the two have little future.
They eliminated any link between crystals (snowflakes) and life before Dembski, Behe or Meyer published anything.
More and more people are seeing that they do.
The principle he identified is still relevent, why should the answer for the stone not serve for the watch?
The problem I have is when I see functional gears and rotary motors and tell myself, these are just illusions,
I would have no way of knowing whether Stonehenge, the statues on Easter island, gobekli tepe, the rosetta stone, or even the stop sign at the end of my street aren't illusions of nature.
I find the idea aliens designed life easier to swallow
than billions of years of chemical evolution could produce a self replicating, self repairing molecule,
or billions of years of natural selection acting on random variations could produce something like the flagellar motor found in some bacteria.
I'd love to see simpler versions of gears in an arthrods legs. Let's see that.
Because I believe it's origin, and the origin of everything here, was supernatural.
I'm distinguishing origins from current processes.
That is, I believe the processes were originally designed and have since run themselves.
The basic idea is repetitive "teeth" in which two parts of the exoskeleton interdigitate and move against each other. So, this is a pretty good example of exaption, a feature evolved for one purpose, that's recruited for another.
So Grasshopper, your teeth and legs came from plants then?
There are plenty of uncertainties - we have very limited data, and it becomes scarcer the further back you go; the theory has been generated from the available data, and has been modified over time to remain consistent with the data. So far, no new data has been shown to be inconsistent with the underlying principle (selection acting on heritable variation), which could potentially falsify the theory.I, too, have been told that. But is it all that true? These are the issues raised in peer-reviewed literature:
I don't know what you mean by that. The way a system operates at one level can give rise to or facilitate patterns of behaviour that can be described by a different set of rules; so the laws of thermodynamics are abstractions of statistical mechanics, and the four rules of Conway's Game of Life can animate patterns that can compute or replicate, etc.Where is that scaling up from?
There are plenty of uncertainties - we have very limited data, and it becomes scarcer the further back you go; the theory has been generated from the available data, and has been modified over time to remain consistent with the data. So far, no new data has been shown to be inconsistent with the underlying principle (selection acting on heritable variation), which could potentially falsify the theory.
There has been speculation for a long time about whether life could have arisen more than once, and whether there might be more than one root - especially when the Archaea were discovered to have radically different ribosomal RNA in the 1970s. It is now the consensus that they're different enough to constitute to a third Domain of life, alongside Bacteria and Eukaryotes, and it has been suggested that this split could have happened at the pre-cellular stage; but we don't have enough evidence to do more than speculate about that.
What isn't in doubt is that all available evidence indicates that eukaryotes have a common ancestor, which seems to be what gives some religious believers indigestion.
physical particles carry information. What you need to explain is how DNA is different.
All chain reactions depend on contingencies. The chain reaction in a nuclear bomb or reactor is contingent upon the distance between uranium atoms. The uranium atoms communicate in the same sense that cells communicate. The particles they produce carry physical information.
"In physics, physical information refers generally to the information that is contained in a physical system. Its usage in quantum mechanics (i.e. quantum information) is important, for example in the concept of quantum entanglement to describe effectively direct or causal relationships between apparently distinct or spatially separated particles.
Information itself may be loosely defined as "that which can distinguish one thing from another".[citation needed] The information embodied by a thing can thus be said to be the identity of the particular thing itself, that is, all of its properties, all that makes it distinct from other (real or potential) things. It is a complete description of the thing, but in a sense that is divorced from any particular language."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information
They calculated it takes 162 million years for a coordinated pair of mutations to occur and fix in humans, 27 times longer than humans have supposedly lived.
Each person is born with 50 mutations. It only takes one generation in one individual for two mutations to occur.
Those same scientists will tell you that all animals share a common ancestor, including humans. Whether or not the ultimate root of the tree is clear, there is more than enough evidence for relationships that falsify special creation and creationism. You might as well make the claim that what we don't know about universal common ancestry makes DNA paternity tests impossible.
It would be nice if you used real scientific sources instead of creationist sites devoted to propaganda.
Why don't you quote the Yockey and Wickens paper, and the data they presented to back their conclusions. You need to cite the primary source.
I take it you are unfazed that these words appear in peer-reviewed science, not some religious document:
"A formal demonstration of the universal common ancestry hypothesis has not been achieved and is unlikely to be feasible in principle"
Because you've conflated "natural theology" with ID. Two entirely different religious doctrines.
Not among geneticists, it seems. But I'd be open to your survey of the literature, showing otherwise.
The basic idea is repetitive "teeth" in which two parts of the exoskeleton interdigitate and move against each other. So, this is a pretty good example of exaption, a feature evolved for one purpose, that's recruited for another.
There's simpler examples of this for locomotion as well; the furca of springtails has teeth that interdigitate and then release to allow jumping. So the argument boils down to "I just don't think it could evolve, even though there are simpler examples."
Very next sentence
"Nevertheless, the evidence in support of this hypothesis provided by comparative genomics is overwhelming."
SOURCE
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2993666/
You introduced Paley in this conversation in post #45, not me
This is a just-so story
it invokes a black box and foresight.
You've identified a possible starting point
To move the teeth on the lower leg into a functional position on the upper leg is a change in body plan.
A developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRN) will have to be changed,
however any mutations to a dGRN lead to "catastrophic loss of the body part or loss of viability altogether" (Evolutionary Bioscience as Regulatory Systems Biology, Davidson p.38). It would lose the leg or die because dGRN's don't tolerate change.
It would require foresight, not trial and error, to place the gears in a precise position as not cause a loss of fitness to the organism.
I don't know what you mean by that. The way a system operates at one level can give rise to or facilitate patterns of behaviour that can be described by a different set of rules; so the laws of thermodynamics are abstractions of statistical mechanics, and the four rules of Conway's Game of Life can animate patterns that can compute or replicate, etc.
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