Science Forums 2

[Biochemist]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

What credible information, exactly?

There is quite a bit of credible information. Almost all off it can be "credibly" refuted, but it is only that.

Whether or not you weight the credibility of Michael Behe's original arguments as high, medium or low (I would put it at medium), or Dembski's mathematical assessments (I would put these slightly lower), they have credible positions.

Keep in mind that many of us have held the initial Punctuated Equilibrium hypotheses (as originally asserted by Gould and Eldredge in 1972) as a pretty interesting view of the same data that everyone else thought supported gradualism. I think that PE is held by most folks as a credible position, although it does not overturn the weight of the argument for mutation-mediated gradualism.

I happen to think (not believe, think) that the weight of the concrete arguments directly supporting mutation-driven speciation are weak. Ergo, they are more easily called into question (not necessarily overturned) by credible opposing views.

Behe started with simple observational points that some complex structures do not seem to have practical paths for serial mutation to result in a complex endpoint. Credible antagonists have countered that some elements of his complex structures do (in fact) pre-exist in other locales and for other purposes. But the key point is that neither position is proof.

As we gene-sequence more genomes, I suspect we are going to find some real surprises. Specifically, I think we are going to find daughter species that are phenotypically very different from parent species, and that some complex phenotypes arise suddenly without intervening selection. I think that is what the fossil record shows.

In this context (assuming we accept the sub-hypothesis of common descent, as I do) we do not have a mechanism for speciation. We just know it happens.

This would (essentially) put the macro-evolution discussion into a similar bucket where we now hold abiogenesis. Everyone sort of assumes it happened (heck, we are here, aren't we?) but no one has a particularly compelling argument for the mechanism. (I don't happen to think the evidence for aliens putting is here is particularly compelling, by the way).

Many folks (including me) have a difficult time accepting the notion that in the roughly 1 billion years between earth formation and the first prokaryote, that life showed up by accident out of the hostile chemical goo. That first little beggar 3.5 billion years ago was remarkably complex and already contained nearly all of the infrastructural machinery to replicate that we still use today in all phyla. Assuming it took 600 or 700 million years for the earth to cool, this leaves 300-400 million years for this little dude to begin to replicate. Pretty significant achievement, given that the replication method that showed up "spontaneously" 3.5 billion year ago is still with us in substantially the same form.

Hence we are arguing (with a straight face) that this biogenetic event occurred in a hostile environment 3.5 billion years ago, and yet, it has never occurred since (at least not well enough to create a different sort of life architecture).

If we can leave open some of the questions about abiogenesis, we can certainly leave open some of the questions about ID. ID folks are NOT saying "God did it". All they are saying is we cannot assert (based on the fact base) that this was exclusively serial mutation.

That, in my opinion, is science.

Bio