Flowers and the birds may have evolved together in a process called "coevolution", he said.>

"...and the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees...and a thing called love."

Does happen, though, Peter. Some cycads are pollinated today by snout weevils, but since snout weevils evolved later than cycads, there must have been a different method at one time.

It's the old tapeworm problem again. Tapeworms could not possibly have evolved "up" from something less complicated, they had to evolve "down" from something more complicated.

If Orrin wants to jeer at stasis, there are plenty of more extravagent examples. Horseshoe crabs, for example, pretty much unchanged for 400 million years.

You're preachin' to the choir, Brother, but you're in the right hymnal.

oj,

Yes, the anti-science echo chamber you have here allows for such preaching.

Or let me be more blunt; the anti-science nutball non-sense of Christian "creationists" have as much merit in their arguments as their equally idiotic anti-science friends amongst the "ecological doom" crowd.

Plutarch:

Precisely, Creationism and Naturalism are equally dubious. Darwin and Bishop Ussher equally nonsensical.

I don't see the issue. Evolution would generally be a very conservative process - things are, after all, as they are for good if not obvious reasons; and the changes made will be small at first, tested locally, and usually failures.

If the air and the flowers haven't changed, why would the hummingbirds?

And with a change every thirty million years or so the ameoba will have legs in the year 900 Trillion.

Ah, but one successful change queers the whole system for everybody; it sets off a scramble. Asteroids killing off the big predators would too, of couse; my point is simply that it's hardly shocking that long periods of near-stasis are the norm, and doesn't necessarily tell us much about how fast things will roll once the applecart is upset.

mike:

I agree, it's the necessity for some external intervention to drive the period of change that deep sixes Darwin though.

At this point, I don't give a rat's you-know-what about these hummingbird fossils, and what they do or don't "prove" about evolution. First, someone explain how blood clotting could possibly have evolved.

"In Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution I devoted a chapter to the mechanism of blood clotting, arguing that it is irreducibly complex and therefore a big problem for Darwinian evolution. Since my book came out, as far as I am aware there have been no papers published in the scientific literature giving a detailed scenario or experiments to show how natural selection could have built the system." -- Michael Behe (http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_indefenseofbloodclottingcascade.htm)

Roy, Behe, like Orrin, knows next to nothing about natural history.

Plants don't have immune systems, yet they don't get cancer either. What's that, a case of irreducible simplicity?

The notion of irreducible complexity is, like all Orrin's objections to darwinism, a case of reasoning backwards.

Since Darwinists reason forwards, the critique is meaningless.

Natural Selection is the system that explains how all life that ever existed arose without outside interference. Therefore, if it exists, it arose by Natural Selection.

Harry,
Pardon my ignorance, but what does a knowledge of "natural history" have to do with explaining how something as ubiquitous amongst reptiles, birds, and mammals (at a minimum; fish probably have it as well) as blood clotting came to be?

Dismissal is not a rebuttal.

Reason forward for us; tell us how Darwinism can explain blood clotting.

Harry:

Reason forward? It's entirely historical. Darwin came after evolution was done.

David:

How'd Nature arise without Natural Selection?

Roy:

And Behe, to his credit, links to rebuttals of his discussion that I at least find far more convincing than his arguments.

Behe's argument boils down to "No one can explain why this happened, therefore God must have done it." Given that a lot of similar events can be given plausible explainations, and that we frankly don't understand some of this very well, dragging miracles into it to finish a few oddball cases seems peculiar.

Mike,
Can you list a few of the "similar events" you mentioned?

Also, I don't think that Darwinism has merely a "few oddball cases" to deal with in the biochemical realm. Behe monitors the literature, and he hasn't found many articles in which anyone has proposed evolutionary pathways explaining biochemical systems. "In the past ten years [the Journal of Molecular Evolution] has published over a thousand papers. Of these, about one hundred discussed the chemical synthesis of molecules thought to be necessary for the origin of life, about 50 proposed mathematical models to improve sequence analysis, and about 800 were analyses of sequences. There were ZERO papers discussing detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures. This is not a peculiarity of JME. No papers are to be found that discuss detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nature, Science, the Journal of Molecular Biology or, to my knowledge, any science journal whatsoever." (Behe, http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_idfrombiochemistry.htm)

David, you got it.

Well, Behe ought to extend his sights a bit, Roy. I am only a few pages into it, but last night I began reading a study of conservation of mutations in apical meristems. It's exactly about what Behe says nobody reports on and -- I peeked ahead -- it cites several thousand research papers.

But, as I've noted before, antievolutionists never think about plants.

Plants evolve, too.

But they stay apricot merrystems

The internet is where sarcasm goes to die.

Ah, I see, your "it" referred to life? My bad.

Harry,
I'm not up on the current research in apical meristems, so can you tell me what biochemical systems this research deals with?

By the way, Harry, I'm still waiting to hear why Behe's alleged ignorance of natural history disqualifies him from raising questions about Darwinism's ability to explain how life came to be as it is.

Any other ad hominems you'd like to mention while you're at it?

Roy:

Abscence of proof is not proof of abscense. I found really interesting some experiments where designs for electronic circuits were 'evoloved'. The designs were in most respects superior to human-made ones - they had some bizarre quirks due to experimental conditions that weren't adequately controlled - and they were so complex that humans couldn't figure out how they worked, much less figure out the evolutionary path (except that they actually had a history of that, so it was visible directly)...

So the lack of (untestable) papers on this subjects doesn't strike me as very meaningful.

mike:

I doubt any of us will disagree with you that evolution works just that way-- intelligently designed experimentation.

Mike,
I don't think Behe has asked for proof of how a biochemical system has evolved. He's asked for theoretical pathways. He's asking for an open and rigorous discussion of the subject.

From my reading of his book "Darwin's Black Box," he's saying "Here's an irreducably complex biochemical system (e.g. blood clotting, intra-cellular protein transport). I don't think Darwinism can explain how such a system arose, but I'm open to arguments."

He's endured much scoffing, but I'm not aware that anyone has delivered a KO to his argument.

Roy, I'd say nobody is rushing to answer Behe's objections because they are not interesting and not well reasoned.

Behe isn't well up in apical meristems, either, but that doesn't mean anything except that Behe is an ignoramus.

If you're going to critique any subject, the absolute minimum initial requirement is to find out what the subject is.

In fact, though you and Behe are ignorant of the fact, there are thousands of research papers on how systems have developed to, for example, recognize copying errors in somatic plant cells and regulate accumulation of mutation load.

These systems are, like blood clotting, multistaged, and perhaps to a naif irreducibly complex. But they are understood in good detail, and there exists a persuasive mathematical model of how they could have evolved by stages.

(Plants do not follow Weisman's doctrine, which is good for metazoa, so new traits acquired in the some can be passed on.)

Of course, mathematical models are by definition evidence of potential design.

Roy is right, no one has.

What that means, though, is open to discussion. I think it is fair to say the problem is extremely complex. And like most any complex problem, it gets solved from the edges.

In complete contrast to the statement "irreducably complex," which assumes as proven that which is far from known. How does anyone know that, say, blood clotting, is irreducably complex? That there is nothing simpler of which it could be made?

OJ is of course wrong in asserting that the evolution behind those electric circuits (or real world computer programs that use random variation and recursion to design complex networks) is intelligently designed experimentation.

Once the ball got rolling, there was nothing intelligent about it. As for how the ball got rolling, who knows? But that is a subject entirely different from Darwinism.

"once the ball got rolling..."

Harry,
I knew I could count on you for another ad-hominem, rather than actually responding to my questions. Here's another one for you to ignore: Have you ever read Behe? Also, I'd like to learn more about this mathematical model, can you at least name it so someone could google it?

Mike,
"How does anyone know that, say, blood clotting, is irreducably complex? That there is nothing simpler of which it could be made?" Does anything simpler exist that accomplishes the same end, or even a similar end?

Roy, the issue of irreducible complexity was brought up by the antidarwinians with the example of vision, which the darwinians were assured could not possible by explained in steps.

It turned out it was easy to explain it in steps.

Along comes Behe and says, 'Hey, wait, your theory cannot account for irreducible complexity!'

And then you and he claim as vindication for your views that the darwinians don't drop everything and pursue some already investigated line of research to satisfy one petulant lawyer.

If that's ad hominem, so be it.

The mathematical demonstration is in the Klewkowski book I recommended. It does not have a name, as far as I know. Klewkowski, at any rate, does not name it.

Orrin, anything designed ought to be (I think) subject to mathematical modeling. (Never thought about that before, so I'm not sure.) But plenty of things that clearly are not designed are also modelable. Weather, for example.

Gravity.

Weather and gravity do not require the intervention of intelligence within their processes, so are mathematizable. Evolution, economics, lamguage, etc. are not.

Harry,
It appears you've never read Behe; he's well aware of the vision example you mention, and he doesn't think that case was one of irreducable complexity.

Nome of the examples of things he calls irreducably complex are on the level of gross anatomy, they're all on the biochemical level. (He refers to them as molecular machines.) If it's so bloody easy to explain how they arose, then point me to some examples of someone doing it. People have time to post detailed synopsis of every episode of "Friends" on the web, surely somebody could provide a decent rebuttal of Behe's arguments, since in your estimation he's a naif and an ignoramus.

Regarding Klewkowski: you mentioned "a book," but you didn't offer a title.

Amazon knows nothing of any book authored by a "Klewkowski." Google turned up only a few references, the most likely of which was a history of the biology greenhouse facilities at UMass-Amhurst. Not much help there.

"Mutation, Develoopmental Selection and Plant Evolution."

Behe can offer parameters for the discussion, but I don't have to accept them.

His reaction is like the psi researchers at Duke. They set up the test and failed it. So they blamed the judges, inventing the concept of psi-shyness; the mere presence of the observer ruined the experiment.

For 100 years, the eyeball was offered as an example of irreducible complexity. So was the wing.

Turned out, the argument was no good.

So Behe says, 'Wait, wait, I have another one!'

And after that's knocked down, he'll find yet another. Count on it.

The Klewkowski book is about work at the molecular level.

Harry's right.

Behe just wants to argue from ignorance to miracles.

All that proves is our current, and his permanent, ignorance. Not the miracles.