Subject:
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Re: In the interest of full disclosure...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 9 Feb 2001 22:29:32 GMT
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Viewed:
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207 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Tim Culberson writes:
> > To take Behe's mousetrap analogy: it's true that half a mousetrap isn't
> > much of a mousetrap. But there's plenty of other useful things you can do
> > with a piece of board, or a spring, or a sliver of metal. And if you juggle
> > them around for long enough, picking those arrangements that do something
> > vaguely interesting, you could well end up with a mouse trap.
>
> I realise the limits of taking an analogy too far...but since you
> already did it.....what you've just said is still intelligent design.
> What are the chances of a moustrap forming if you put all the parts into
> a box and shake it - that's not having intelligent design.
Repeatedly shaking such a box is simply re-randomization. If somehow you
could discard every faulty physical combination of the elements and preserve
the useful ones (as traits are discarded or preserved through evolution)
your chances at arriving at a mousetrap (or, for that matter, some better
design of the same components) a lot quicker. And we're talking
***millions*** of shakes (or generations).
> > He also disregards the possibility of biological scaffolding. If you look
> > at a cake, it can be hard to imagine how it came to be made out of flour,
> > eggs, milk etc. Maybe it just appeared? But when you see the finished cake,
> > you don't see the stove, spoons, and bowls that were needed to make it.
>
> I love this example. I see you conveniently left out "the chef
> (baker?)" in your list. Without any "thing that is intelligent" to
> create the cake, you'll never have a cake....even if you wait for 4.5
> billion years. That scaffolding you list is useless without somebody to
> use it!
You're anthropomorphizing. The "somebody" doesn't have to be a person or
even an intelligence. The somebody can be a systematic process of
preservation and rejection by which certain advantages are retained while
others are discarded.
Further, if you identify the cake as the pinnacle of evolution, then we
can consider humans, and everything from which we evolved, simply as means
to cake production.
Dave!
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: In the interest of full disclosure...
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| (...) I realise the limits of taking an analogy too far...but since you already did it.....what you've just said is still intelligent design. What are the chances of a moustrap forming if you put all the parts into a box and shake it - that's not (...) (24 years ago, 9-Feb-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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