• The IDiocy that never existed

    From RonO@21:1/5 to All on Thu Apr 27 20:04:11 2023
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
    about an ID scam that never existed. For one thing there never was
    supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam. When IDiocy started the ID perps were lying about it not being about their religious beliefs, and they didn't start their religious web sites and categories
    like "Faith and Science" at the ID scam propaganda site until after the
    scam was exposed during the Dover fiasco. No one has ever gotten any ID science out of any of the ID perps. Not ever. All any IDiot rube
    creationists ever get from the ID perps is an obfuscation and denial
    switch scam that the ID perps tell them has nothing to do with ID. ID
    has only been the bait for over 20 years. They have only used ID to
    attract the creationist rubes in order to feed them the switch scam.
    Nearly all IDiotic creationist rubes never wanted the switch scam, and currently only Louisiana and Texas still have switch scam legislation or
    school board policies still on the books. Neither state has tried to
    use the switch scam to support their creationist beliefs since they had
    the bait and switch run on them again in 2013. The ID perps had to
    remind the IDiots that the switch scam was supposed to have nothing to
    do with ID creationism when both states tried to put ID creationist
    supplements into school textbooks. Neither state has tried again in the
    last decade.

    The article seems to be claiming that all the apparent failures of
    IDiocy are due to ID being misunderstood by the creationist rubes. The
    book sounds about as lame as Meyer's God Hypothesis that never put up
    any coherent hypothesis about God, but just disjointed and disassociated god-of-the-gaps denial junk. Meyer claimed that he did not want to
    create a coherent hypothesis that could be related to his personal god hypothesis, so he just used the god-of-the-gaps nonsense as independent
    bits of denial that were not supposed to be used to develop any type of
    real god hypothesis.

    Gauger's book seems to be just misrepresentation of reality, and not
    something that is about anything that really ever existed. You just
    have to look at the other IDiotic articles put up for the last few years
    to support the ID scam at the creationist news site to understand that
    she isn't talking about any type of ID that any ID perps are associated
    with. Just like Luskin's article on what ID was supposed to be and how
    it should be defended, you can look at how the ID perps are actually
    defending IDiocy at the news site where Luskin published the article,
    and you know that Luskin is out to lunch.

    Still recommended up at the creationist news site. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/12/what-is-intelligent-design-and-how-should-we-defend-it/

    They both should have read the junk that actually gets posted there to
    support the ID scam before writing what they have.

    Ron Okimoto

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  • From JTEM is my hero@21:1/5 to RonO on Sun Apr 30 20:35:32 2023
    RonO wrote:

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
    about an ID scam that never existed. For one thing there never was
    supposed to be a Catholic case for the

    Strict creationism, Intelligent Design is a fundamentalist Protestant
    (or Evangelical, if you prefer) phenomenon. The Catholic church has
    no problem if members want to believe in a literally true bible but
    neither does it teach it.

    Google: Mendel

    Then Google: mendelian laws of genetics

    This is not new. This wasn't new 100 years ago.

    Ironically, your Darwin gets the credit for setting back the English
    speaking world FOR DECADES when he became the face of naturalism
    and swept Mendel under the carpet... so well, in fact, that idiots think
    the Catholic church is teaching I.D. more than 150 years after Mendel
    proved they are wrong...

    Some people just need the extra time to "Catch up," I suppose...





    -- --

    https://jtem.tumblr.com/post/716051658844651520

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  • From peter2nyikos@gmail.com@21:1/5 to RonO on Tue May 2 06:08:52 2023
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
    about an ID scam that never existed.

    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
    sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean
    that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God. =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    For one thing there never was
    supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam.

    There always was a Catholic case for the design in nature,
    especially in Thomas Aquinas's writings. Ron O has no good way
    to distinguish between that and the things he grossly distorts below,
    because he utterly loathes any attempt to argue for God's existence
    in a rational way.

    In this respect he is worse than some atheists and agnostics.
    One of the latter, Loren Eiseley, in a book about our evolution
    from lowly life forms, wrote the following about one of the earliest tetrapods:

    ``Perhaps there also, among rotting fish heads and blue,
    night-burning bog lights, moved the eternal mystery,
    the careful finger of God. The increase was not much.
    It was two bubbles, two thin-walled little balloons at the
    end of the Snout's small brain. The cerebral hemispheres
    had appeared.''
    --Loren Eiseley, _The Immense Journey_


    Ron O now goes into another one of his formulaic rants, already old a
    decade and more ago, about an imaginary "bait and switch scam" for which
    he has never given any credible evidence for the existence of "bait."

    When IDiocy started the ID perps were lying about it not being about their religious
    beliefs, and they didn't start their religious web sites and categories
    like "Faith and Science" at the ID scam propaganda site until after the
    scam was exposed during the Dover fiasco. No one has ever gotten any ID science out of any of the ID perps. Not ever.

    This is a gross distortion of what happened at Dover, and the
    last two sentences are an indication of how ignorant Ron O
    is about the nature of scientific theories. I told Burkhard
    last month about a theory that Behe built about the limitations
    of mutation, especially where the malaria parasite is concerned:

    https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/aEWcwKdnhaY/m/b3QDSySsAAAJ
    Re: steady state theory of biological origin
    Apr 18, 2023, 10:20:25 PM

    Behe did this in the book, _The_Edge_of_Evolution_, which Ron O shows
    no signs of ever heard about.

    All any IDiot rube
    creationists ever get from the ID perps is an obfuscation and denial
    switch scam that the ID perps tell them has nothing to do with ID. ID
    has only been the bait for over 20 years. They have only used ID to
    attract the creationist rubes in order to feed them the switch scam.
    Nearly all IDiotic creationist rubes never wanted the switch scam, and currently only Louisiana and Texas still have switch scam legislation or school board policies still on the books. Neither state has tried to
    use the switch scam to support their creationist beliefs since they had
    the bait and switch run on them again in 2013. The ID perps had to
    remind the IDiots that the switch scam was supposed to have nothing to
    do with ID creationism when both states tried to put ID creationist supplements into school textbooks. Neither state has tried again in the
    last decade.

    Finally, Ron O tries to connect with the article, and fails miserably:

    The article seems to be claiming that all the apparent failures of
    IDiocy are due to ID being misunderstood by the creationist rubes.

    NO such claim is even hinted at in the book. Christian critics of ID are described
    as misunderstanding it, but none of them is described as having any taint of creationism. One of those critics, Kenneth Miller, is as zealous a foe
    of ID (and especially Behe) as any atheist.

    The "failures" are purely political, and are due to a massive disinformation campaign at all levels, including Ron O's own rantings. Primary is the
    false claim that ID is religion-based creationism. It is not, as the
    first excerpt above shows. Here is another:

    ______________________ second excerpt________________________

    While all ID proponents agree that certain features of nature are best explained by an intelligent cause, on many side issues ID proponents may have different points of view, with different assumptions. For example, ID makes no claim about universal
    common descent. Some ID supporters agree with universal common descent, but many ID supporters argue against the idea that all life shares a common ancestor. There are also different views about the ways in which design may be instantiated, and the
    degree to which natural processes are involved. These different views are not necessarily a sign of something bad — in fact to a large extent they reflect a healthy diversity of models that exist and are being discussed, tested, and refined.

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of second excerpt ++++++++++++++

    The book sounds about as lame as Meyer's God Hypothesis that never put up any coherent hypothesis about God, but just disjointed and disassociated god-of-the-gaps denial junk. Meyer claimed that he did not want to
    create a coherent hypothesis that could be related to his personal god hypothesis, so he just used the god-of-the-gaps nonsense as independent
    bits of denial that were not supposed to be used to develop any type of
    real god hypothesis.

    Ron O is pretending that all arguments about design are intended
    to give a coherent picture of God. The second excerpt puts paid to that,
    but here is another excerpt that reads almost like a direct answer
    to Ron O's crap in the preceding paragraph:

    _____________________ third excerpt________________________
    Design proponents have made arguments for real rather than apparent design at different levels. For instance, they’ve argued that the beginning of the universe requires an intelligent cause (William Lane Craig and James Sinclair), that the laws of
    physics are designed (Robin Collins), that our planet is uniquely designed (Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards), that chemistry as we know it is designed for life (Michael Denton; Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt), that the building blocks of living
    things cannot be found by blind searches but must be designed (Douglas Axe), that the first living creature and the fossil record give evidence of design (Stephen Meyer), and that both macro- and micro-features of living things give evidence of
    intelligent design (Michael Denton; Michael Behe).

    Note three quick things about these arguments. First, contrary to ste­reotypes, these arguments are not “god-of-the-gaps” arguments. None of these arguments claims, “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” Rather, the standard
    mode of argumentation for design proponents is an inference to the best explanation — a common form of reasoning in general and in the historical sciences (like evolutionary biology) in particular. They argue that there are positive signs of
    intentional design in nature and that non-intentional explanations are weak by comparison.

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of second excerpt ++++++++++++++


    Gauger's book seems to be just misrepresentation of reality, and not something that is about anything that really ever existed. You just
    have to look at the other IDiotic articles put up for the last few years
    to support the ID scam at the creationist news site to understand that
    she isn't talking about any type of ID that any ID perps are associated with.

    Ron O has shot himself in the foot by disqualifying real ID theory
    as being the thing he ranted about in his stereotyped spiel.


    Just like Luskin's article on what ID was supposed to be and how
    it should be defended, you can look at how the ID perps are actually defending IDiocy at the news site where Luskin published the article,
    and you know that Luskin is out to lunch.

    Still recommended up at the creationist news site. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/12/what-is-intelligent-design-and-how-should-we-defend-it/

    They both should have read the junk that actually gets posted there to support the ID scam before writing what they have.

    Ron Okimoto

    To use one of Ron O's favorite insults against him:
    "You can't make this junk up."
    -- meaning, the truth of what junk Ron O is capable of is stranger than any fiction anyone could make up about him.


    Peter Nyikos
    Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
    University of South Carolina
    http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

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  • From Lawyer Daggett@21:1/5 to peter2...@gmail.com on Tue May 2 06:30:17 2023
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
    sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean
    that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
    things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.
    In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.

    It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief
    system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
    just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

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  • From peter2nyikos@gmail.com@21:1/5 to Lawyer Daggett on Tue May 2 07:10:29 2023
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:35:08 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t
    mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================
    A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
    things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.

    You are conflating the part after the dash with the part that came before.


    In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.

    She is honest about both things: the things that ID theorists
    write about qua ID theorists, and the things to which Catholics
    are dogmatically committed.

    If you can find a place in the article where Granger confuses
    the two issues, I'd certainly like to know about it.


    It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief
    system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
    just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

    You obviously didn't read far enough to see what I wrote about to your buddy Burkhard:

    _________________________ repost of snipped text___________________

    I told Burkhard last month about a theory that Behe built about the limitations of mutation, especially where the malaria parasite is concerned:

    https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/aEWcwKdnhaY/m/b3QDSySsAAAJ
    Re: steady state theory of biological origin
    Apr 18, 2023, 10:20:25 PM

    Behe did this in the book, _The_Edge_of_Evolution_, which Ron O shows
    no signs of ever [having] heard about.

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of repost +++++++++++++++

    How well do you know that book? Burkhard showed how little he understood
    about it in the text I preserved in the linked post.


    Peter Nyikos
    Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
    Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
    http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

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  • From =?UTF-8?B?w5bDtiBUaWli?=@21:1/5 to peter2...@gmail.com on Tue May 2 07:22:24 2023
    On Tuesday, 2 May 2023 at 16:10:08 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
    sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean
    that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt =========================== >For one thing there never was
    supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam.
    There always was a Catholic case for the design in nature,
    especially in Thomas Aquinas's writings. Ron O has no good way
    to distinguish between that and the things he grossly distorts below, because he utterly loathes any attempt to argue for God's existence
    in a rational way.

    There have always been some con artists among Catholics (like in any organisation) but Catholics as Church never wanted to participate in that particular intelligent design scam and in science debates in general. Most Catholics I know of (in our massively atheist country) say that they
    believe because they feel Jesus participating in their lives, not because
    there is some kind of science that shows that God actively did cause
    floods or destruction of Pompeii or something. Catholics say that human
    soul is made by God and is not natural process so beyond science.

    Also, how do "Certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process." and
    “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” differ? Former is just saying less than latter with more words.

    The evolutionnews/discotute still do never publish any positive clams about how, when and why anything happened. What most important they still do
    never research it. Only obfuscation, denial and fake political promises. Fake promises to find strong indications in natural world that there is God.
    To find those indications with science that they never do. How it is not
    scam? How it does not hurt? So the Catholic Church stays wisely out of
    such "scientific" arguments and debates.

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  • From peter2nyikos@gmail.com@21:1/5 to peter2...@gmail.com on Tue May 2 07:27:30 2023
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:15:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    If you can find a place in the article where Granger confuses
    the two issues, I'd certainly like to know about it.

    Of course, "Granger" should read "Gauger."

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  • From Lawyer Daggett@21:1/5 to peter2...@gmail.com on Tue May 2 10:06:00 2023
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:15:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:35:08 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________ …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t
    mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
    things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.

    You are conflating the part after the dash with the part that came before.

    Two words that are different: conflating, incorporating.

    You conflate incorporating with conflating. You attempt to manufacture
    a separation between the a priori dogmatic conviction in a god the designer with a process of examining nature with the purpose of detecting design.

    And it doesn't matter if you further manufacture a hypothetical distinction between the attempt to find design and an unbiased look at nature. There
    still exists the prior commitment to the conclusion of your God having
    designed nature.

    It remains a lie to play pretend that you aren't committed to your a priori conclusion that your God has designed life and the universe.

    In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.

    She is honest about both things: the things that ID theorists
    write about qua ID theorists, and the things to which Catholics
    are dogmatically committed.

    If you can find a place in the article where Granger confuses
    the two issues, I'd certainly like to know about it.

    She appears to be honest about not asserting a false narrative
    that makes a fraudulent game of ignoring the reality of one
    while doing the other. But I have to wonder at your apparent
    attempt to twist in an insinuation that I questioned her honesty
    as I was applauding it.

    It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
    just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

    You obviously didn't read far enough to see what I wrote about to your buddy Burkhard:

    As usual, you do not accomplish what you imagine you do.
    Not only would your claim below be irrelevant if it were true, it's dubious as well.
    You addressed the argument to Burkhard so I didn't jump in to refute you. You're tried to argue the point with him before, and I think you failed. Moreover,
    you abandoned the argument when you cited chapter and verse examples
    of how you were mistaken. Your response was to repeat your ad hominen
    claim that he is a "scientific non-entity" (with the implied self-aggrandized implication that you are his superior).

    I don't know if he wants anyone to jump in and dispute you. So far, every
    time he has bothered he's torn you to shreds and you've ignored those
    posts and started all over again in different threads.

    By your own methods, if I had jumped in to expose where I thought
    your lines of argument were wrong, you would have retorted with
    complaints about people teaming up to pick on you. Between that
    and Burkhard being quite capable of exposing where you were wrong,
    I figured the best move was to just go buy some popcorn and enjoy the
    show. The only reason I hedge on this now is that if I had come back
    from 3 weeks hiking around Corfu I might size up the significance
    (more properly the lack of significance) of your attacks and just ignore
    them until I had some important article to avoid writing.

    _________________________ repost of snipped text___________________
    I told Burkhard last month about a theory that Behe built about the limitations
    of mutation, especially where the malaria parasite is concerned:

    https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/aEWcwKdnhaY/m/b3QDSySsAAAJ
    Re: steady state theory of biological origin
    Apr 18, 2023, 10:20:25 PM
    Behe did this in the book, _The_Edge_of_Evolution_, which Ron O shows
    no signs of ever [having] heard about.

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of repost +++++++++++++++

    How well do you know that book? Burkhard showed how little he understood about it in the text I preserved in the linked post.
    Peter Nyikos
    Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
    Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
    http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

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  • From peter2nyikos@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Tue May 2 18:51:00 2023
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
    On Tuesday, 2 May 2023 at 16:10:08 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t
    mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================
    For one thing there never was
    supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam.

    There always was a Catholic case for the design in nature,
    especially in Thomas Aquinas's writings. Ron O has no good way
    to distinguish between that and the things he grossly distorts below, because he utterly loathes any attempt to argue for God's existence
    in a rational way.

    There have always been some con artists among Catholics (like in any organisation) but Catholics as Church never wanted to participate in that particular intelligent design scam

    I see you have bought into the Ron O obsession with his chameleonic speculation about the existence of a scam by the ID movement.
    Rather than getting into its protean variations in this post, I'll be critiquing your idea of "that particular" scam.


    and in science debates in general. Most
    Catholics I know of (in our massively atheist country) say that they
    believe because they feel Jesus participating in their lives,

    You are seeing a highly atypical bunch of Evangelical missionaries.
    Most Catholics do not allege having such feelings. In fact, an
    increasing percentage have even ceased to think of Jesus as more
    than an admirable individual of our species. Already, a majority
    no longer believe Jesus is present in the Holy Eucharist, never mind
    as a participant in their own lives.


    not because
    there is some kind of science that shows that God actively did cause
    floods or destruction of Pompeii or something.

    This is a naive form of Biblical literalism having nothing to do with Intelligent Design (ID)
    and not much to do with creationism. [Note, I wrote "creationism," not "creationists".]


    Catholics say that human
    soul is made by God and is not natural process so beyond science.

    The soul isn't generally believed to be material. As such, it is outside the scope of ID.


    Also, how do "Certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process." and “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” differ?

    The big difference is the word "God." All ID hypothesizes is a designer -- not even a creator.
    I have long written about the concept of a designer that naturally evolved in a far older
    and grander universe in the multiverse, and had the ability to manipulate the fundamental
    constants of a pre-Big-Bang mass of "stuff" to produce a much shorter-lived and
    smaller universe -- ours.

    I've started to look in detail at one modest approximation to such a grander universe
    on the following thread:

    Designer of Our Universe by the Back Door? https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/QflrDHqlDD0


    Former is
    just saying less than latter with more words.

    On the contrary, the former encompasses a much wider range of possibilities than
    the "God of the gaps". And it gets even broader when one considers such events as the production of the first prokaryotes, and the first eukaryotes reproducing via meiosis,
    and the Cambrian explosion. Each can be hypothesized as due to intelligent, technologically advanced
    motiles naturally evolved on an exoplanet -- just as YOU believe we evolved from prebiotic
    chemical compounds on earth.


    The evolutionnews/discotute still do never publish any positive clams about how, when and why anything happened.

    So what? I told Burkhard the following in the same post that I recalled for the lazy Daggett:

    "We have no idea how, when, and by what route the original human inhabitants of Madagascar got there; nor of how big the first wave was,
    nor whether there was a second wave, etc. The one thing we are sure of is that they came
    from Southeast Asia, probably Malaysia/Indonesia. All else is folklore with no written records."

    Nor, I might add, any artifacts that could be dated to the first century after the coming of
    the first arrivals -- whenever it was. Yet we know such things had to have existed.


    What most important they still do never research it. Only obfuscation, denial and fake political promises.

    Pure hearsay on your part, and you don't even tell us where you got these ideas.
    Surely you aren't so naive as to base ANY of this on the undocumented ravings of Ron O.

    Minnich did research the Irreducible Complexity (IC) of one kind of bacterial flagellum.
    This is something that Judge Jones shoved down the memory hole of his wretched essay
    that he composed as a prelude to his Dover ruling, and which Ron O believes to be gospel truth.

    You may retort that this was a far cry from showing that the flagellum was designed.
    However, many anti-ID zealots are afraid of admitting even this weak evidence for ID.
    Kenneth Miller in particular has made a big deal of trying to refute examples of IC,
    and has been made a celebrity by anti-ID zealots for these efforts.


    Fake promises to find strong indications in natural world that there is God.

    ID theorists make no such promises. You have had the wool pulled over your eyes by Ron O--and who else?


    To find those indications with science that they never do. How it is not scam?

    Such a fictitious combination of events *would* qualify as scam.
    If you deny that it is fictitious, please produce evidence.


    How it does not hurt? So the Catholic Church stays wisely out of
    such "scientific" arguments and debates.

    So does Behe and all the leading ID theorists. Refute this if you can -- I predict that you will be unable to do so.


    Peter Nyikos
    Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
    Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
    http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From peter2nyikos@gmail.com@21:1/5 to Lawyer Daggett on Tue May 2 19:15:46 2023
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 1:10:09 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:15:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:35:08 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
    about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________ …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’
    t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically
    committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
    things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.

    You are conflating the part after the dash with the part that came before.
    Two words that are different: conflating, incorporating.

    You conflate incorporating with conflating.

    This is an unwarranted reading of more into what Gauger wrote than she
    actually did. If our views on ID were reversed, and you indulged in
    such a stretch, jillery would be all over you.


    You attempt to manufacture
    a separation between the a priori dogmatic conviction in a god the designer with a process of examining nature with the purpose of detecting design.

    Apply that to an atheist attacking design, *mutatis* *mutandis* [1] and try
    and see how *ad* *hominem* YOUR allegation is.

    [1] for "in a god" substitute "the nonexistence of a god" and for "detecting" substitute "refuting the existence of".


    And it doesn't matter if you further manufacture a hypothetical distinction between the attempt to find design and an unbiased look at nature.

    It appears that the concept of a disinterested pursuit of truth is alien to your nature.
    Thus, your specialized knowledge of scientifically-arrived-at data
    is not enough to qualify you as a person with a scientific worldview.


    There still exists the prior commitment to the conclusion of your God having designed nature.

    Stow the second person "you," matey, or be guilty of grossly misrepresenting me.


    It remains a lie to play pretend that you aren't committed to your a priori conclusion that your God has designed life and the universe.

    Careful, you are bordering on outright libel with your continued use of the second person.


    Got to go now. Duty calls.


    CONCLUDED tomorrow, barring some more intelligent and less eristic
    participant on this thread than yourself joining this thread.
    In which case, it may be next week before I return to your agenda-driven screed.


    Peter Nyikos

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    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Lawyer Daggett@21:1/5 to peter2...@gmail.com on Tue May 2 20:45:10 2023
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:55:09 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:


    snip to the only part I care to address right now

    What most important they still do never research it. Only
    obfuscation, denial and fake political promises.

    Pure hearsay on your part, and you don't even tell us where you got these ideas.
    Surely you aren't so naive as to base ANY of this on the undocumented ravings of Ron O.

    Minnich did research the Irreducible Complexity (IC) of one kind of bacterial flagellum.
    This is something that Judge Jones shoved down the memory hole of his wretched essay
    that he composed as a prelude to his Dover ruling, and which Ron O believes to be gospel truth.


    You often attempt this argument. It fails.
    Nothing about Minnich's work is ID research. His work on the flagellum
    was just investigation of the functional role of various proteins. It was
    good enough work done on a complex system but it wasn't especially
    unique. Essentially identical work on other systems was occurring in
    myriad labs around the world using techniques that were certainly
    evolving to be easier to perform in the lab, but had essentially been in
    play for decades. You knock out a gene and see what happens. In some
    cases, you make the gene's expression dependent upon an inserted
    regulatory element that you can turn off and on.

    It was not work on the origins of flagella. And to the extent that it
    does shed light on the origins of flagella, it is suggestive of being
    derived from a protein secretory system. That is a functional inference independent of the parallel inference derived from sequence homologies.

    You continue to assert that he did ID research but that isn't true
    for any respectable notion of design research.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Lawyer Daggett@21:1/5 to peter2...@gmail.com on Tue May 2 20:30:02 2023
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:20:09 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 1:10:09 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:15:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:35:08 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
    about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
    sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________ …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn
    t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically
    committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
    things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.

    You are conflating the part after the dash with the part that came before.
    Two words that are different: conflating, incorporating.

    You conflate incorporating with conflating.

    This is an unwarranted reading of more into what Gauger wrote than she actually did. If our views on ID were reversed, and you indulged in
    such a stretch, jillery would be all over you.

    How somebody else would react, according to your imagination,
    is absolutely irrelevant. That you invoke this rather than make
    an actual point is at best lazy. Most importantly, you have not
    expressed a tangible objection, just some antagonistic name dropping.

    You introduced a paragraph that included two significant points.
    Most people use paragraphs to express a theme. Linking the
    two ideas is quite natural. There was no attempt to separate
    them by Gauger. It is you who manufacture an artifice to separate
    the two.

    You attempt to manufacture
    a separation between the a priori dogmatic conviction in a god the designer
    with a process of examining nature with the purpose of detecting design.

    Apply that to an atheist attacking design, *mutatis* *mutandis* [1] and try and see how *ad* *hominem* YOUR allegation is.

    [1] for "in a god" substitute "the nonexistence of a god" and for "detecting"
    substitute "refuting the existence of".

    You persist with this odd interpretation of atheism. Specifically, you apparently mean someone who has a dogmatic belief in the non-existence
    of god(s). That's not what atheism is. It is a lack of belief, not some dogmatic conviction.

    After correcting for that, if somebody was investigating nature with
    a dogmatic conviction that there cannot be any god(s), I'd have a
    parallel objection. This doesn't mean they would not be bound by
    methodological naturalism if they want to claim a scientific explanation.
    So your retort fails quite trivially.

    And it doesn't matter if you further manufacture a hypothetical distinction
    between the attempt to find design and an unbiased look at nature.

    It appears that the concept of a disinterested pursuit of truth is alien to your nature.
    Thus, your specialized knowledge of scientifically-arrived-at data
    is not enough to qualify you as a person with a scientific worldview.

    Now that is pure ad hominen with no foundation other than your petulant
    desire to insult people. There's simply nothing in that quoted sentence
    of mine to support your attack.

    I'll restate in case your biases are impeded your reading for comprehension. The ID movement was founded by those who sought to find evidence
    of their god in nature. Your Behe was there at the beginning. He has made
    it clear that his work is an outlet for his faith. He agrees with the Wedge folks about some "threat" that a secular world creates.

    But as a strategy to make inroads into an increasingly secular world, they planned to mimic scientific inquiry with the artifice of an abstracted "designer". They don't really think that way, they just decided they could
    make believe they were considering this amorphous thing in order to
    sneak past people who rejected their religiously motivated apologetics.

    You seem attracted to their game. I suppose that as a mathematician
    you're simply comfortable with positing hypotheticals no matter how
    absurd they are at face value. The same doesn't fly with science. Unlike
    some mathematics, science has a grounding in reality. And in that
    grounding, playing make-believe that the designer being considered
    isn't some ineffable god(s) and is just an undefined placeholder is fundamentally dishonest. It is a manufactured artifice.


    There still exists the prior commitment to the conclusion of your God having
    designed nature.

    Stow the second person "you," matey, or be guilty of grossly misrepresenting me.

    You may be the exception but to me that's more a signature of you havign
    drunk some Wedge brand kool-ade.

    It remains a lie to play pretend that you aren't committed to your a priori
    conclusion that your God has designed life and the universe.

    Careful, you are bordering on outright libel with your continued use of the second person.

    This is yet another bit of dishonest rhetoric you play at. In responding to my post you issue a caution that I shouldn't do something again, and then later
    in the same post, you make an accusation that sounds like you are claiming
    I'm doing something again even after you warned me. It's so bloody childish.

    Got to go now. Duty calls.


    CONCLUDED tomorrow, barring some more intelligent and less eristic participant on this thread than yourself joining this thread.
    In which case, it may be next week before I return to your agenda-driven screed.

    Lucky for talk.origins that You don't have an agenda.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From =?UTF-8?B?w5bDtiBUaWli?=@21:1/5 to peter2...@gmail.com on Wed May 3 03:47:30 2023
    On Wednesday, 3 May 2023 at 04:55:09 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
    On Tuesday, 2 May 2023 at 16:10:08 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________ …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t
    mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================
    For one thing there never was
    supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam.

    There always was a Catholic case for the design in nature,
    especially in Thomas Aquinas's writings. Ron O has no good way
    to distinguish between that and the things he grossly distorts below, because he utterly loathes any attempt to argue for God's existence
    in a rational way.

    There have always been some con artists among Catholics (like in any organisation) but Catholics as Church never wanted to participate in that particular intelligent design scam

    I see you have bought into the Ron O obsession with his chameleonic speculation about the existence of a scam by the ID movement.
    Rather than getting into its protean variations in this post, I'll be critiquing your idea of "that particular" scam.

    Catholics do not of course say that it is "scam". They say something like
    that "ID is theological, not scientific theory and God as directly guiding
    hand behind evolutionary processes is "God of the gaps" argument."
    But as teaching theological theories in public school is possible only
    in "comparison of religions" classes not in science classes then fooling
    people to think that there actually is science is scam.

    and in science debates in general. Most
    Catholics I know of (in our massively atheist country) say that they believe because they feel Jesus participating in their lives,

    You are seeing a highly atypical bunch of Evangelical missionaries.
    Most Catholics do not allege having such feelings. In fact, an
    increasing percentage have even ceased to think of Jesus as more
    than an admirable individual of our species. Already, a majority
    no longer believe Jesus is present in the Holy Eucharist, never mind
    as a participant in their own lives.

    Why atypical? Here most people who do not believe or strongly doubt
    that Jesus is worth praying to just say so. There may be some who
    pretend for whatever personal reasons but these are minority. What
    is the point to pretend? Is there hope to cheat God somehow? Does
    God like lies of courtesy? Most non-believers here try to be civil
    about one's right to world view but consider worshipping deities more
    or less kooky. So one claiming being Jew, Christian or Muslim is
    likely actually believing God.

    not because
    there is some kind of science that shows that God actively did cause floods or destruction of Pompeii or something.

    This is a naive form of Biblical literalism having nothing to do with Intelligent Design (ID)
    and not much to do with creationism. [Note, I wrote "creationism," not "creationists".]

    Ok, I was overly sarcastic, sorry. There clearly were that kind of attempts
    of "creation science". And that is actually science ... just bad, failed science that found no much evidence but plenty of counter-evidence.

    Catholics say that human
    soul is made by God and is not natural process so beyond science.

    The soul isn't generally believed to be material. As such, it is outside the scope of ID.

    Yet what most of the believers believe of God (or whatever they worship) seems
    to be at that level of undetectable and non-material, capable of altering things
    in unknown ways and having odd concept of perfection when dealing with material world. Kind of what God in Futurama anime has: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edCqF_NtpOQ>
    So try to detect acts of someone who considers perfect acts to be impossible to notice.


    Also, how do "Certain features of the universe and of living things are best
    explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process." and “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” differ?

    The big difference is the word "God." All ID hypothesizes is a designer -- not even a creator.
    I have long written about the concept of a designer that naturally evolved in a far older
    and grander universe in the multiverse, and had the ability to manipulate the fundamental
    constants of a pre-Big-Bang mass of "stuff" to produce a much shorter-lived and
    smaller universe -- ours.

    So you mean like Sir Arthur Clarke said that ... sufficiently advanced technology is
    indistinguishable from magic? He was visionary gentlemen. He predicted geostationary
    communication satellites more than decade before launch of Sputnik. But what believers
    believe as Creator is typically not ancient (natural) wielder of super-technologies. God is
    someone from undetectable dimensions beyond natural.

    I've started to look in detail at one modest approximation to such a grander universe
    on the following thread:

    Designer of Our Universe by the Back Door? https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/QflrDHqlDD0
    Former is
    just saying less than latter with more words.

    On the contrary, the former encompasses a much wider range of possibilities than
    the "God of the gaps". And it gets even broader when one considers such events
    as the production of the first prokaryotes, and the first eukaryotes reproducing via meiosis,
    and the Cambrian explosion. Each can be hypothesized as due to intelligent, technologically advanced
    motiles naturally evolved on an exoplanet -- just as YOU believe we evolved from prebiotic
    chemical compounds on earth.

    I trust that there is/was actual manifesto with goal:
    "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God"
    Do you deny it? So the former sentence just carefully avoids saying out what was
    actually meant. Rest of "ranges of possibilities" are mentioned as obfuscation.


    The evolutionnews/discotute still do never publish any positive clams about
    how, when and why anything happened.

    So what? I told Burkhard the following in the same post that I recalled for the lazy Daggett:

    "We have no idea how, when, and by what route the original human inhabitants of Madagascar got there; nor of how big the first wave was,
    nor whether there was a second wave, etc. The one thing we are sure of is that they came
    from Southeast Asia, probably Malaysia/Indonesia. All else is folklore with no written records."

    Nor, I might add, any artifacts that could be dated to the first century after the coming of
    the first arrivals -- whenever it was. Yet we know such things had to have existed.
    What most important they still do never research it. Only obfuscation, denial and fake political promises.
    Pure hearsay on your part, and you don't even tell us where you got these ideas.
    Surely you aren't so naive as to base ANY of this on the undocumented ravings of Ron O.

    But that does not fit as analogy. There are hypothetical concrete events, concrete place,
    concrete doers, concrete reasons, concrete time estimates. However dim, inaccurate and
    doubtful. But concrete.

    Minnich did research the Irreducible Complexity (IC) of one kind of bacterial flagellum.
    This is something that Judge Jones shoved down the memory hole of his wretched essay
    that he composed as a prelude to his Dover ruling, and which Ron O believes to be gospel truth.

    Minnich did analyse what some proteins do and how lack of those damages the species.
    Minnich did not analyse if, when and why these proteins were allegedly designed. Even
    not how many times superficially similar but different flagella were "designed" in nature.
    It was totally ordinary microbiology what Minnich did. And it did not show that those
    can not evolve, just that if to remove a protein then the function of flagellum is damaged.

    You may retort that this was a far cry from showing that the flagellum was designed.
    However, many anti-ID zealots are afraid of admitting even this weak evidence for ID.
    Kenneth Miller in particular has made a big deal of trying to refute examples of IC,
    and has been made a celebrity by anti-ID zealots for these efforts.

    I am ready to accept that hypothesis as one but there just are none said out. So when,
    why, where, how many times different flagella were designed? Cite the explanation? There
    won't be. There will be typical obfuscation and denial implying that "God musta done it"

    Fake promises to find strong indications in natural world that there is God.
    ID theorists make no such promises. You have had the wool pulled over your eyes by Ron O--and who else?

    By Wedge document. Download from discovery org <https://www.discovery.org/m/2019/04/Wedge-Document-So-What.pdf>

    To find those indications with science that they never do. How it is not scam?
    Such a fictitious combination of events *would* qualify as scam.

    Yep. I think most sincere scientists and believers have distanced themselves from
    it because of that it smells bad.

    If you deny that it is fictitious, please produce evidence.

    Phillip E. Johnson: "The movement we now call the wedge made its public debut at
    a conference of scientists and philosophers held at Southern Methodist University
    in March 1992, following the publication of my book Darwin on Trial. The conference
    brought together key wedge and intelligent design figures, particularly Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and myself."

    How it does not hurt? So the Catholic Church stays wisely out of
    such "scientific" arguments and debates.
    So does Behe and all the leading ID theorists. Refute this if you can -- I predict that you will be unable to do so.

    Behe is still "fellow", Meyer "director" of "Center for Science and Culture", Dembski
    has resigned, Johnson is dead. I do not actually understand ... what you deny? Yes, lot of the supporters are scientists but they do not research design. Their
    focus is on doubt and denial and even implied "therefore God musta done it" is not said out.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From peter2nyikos@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Thu May 4 06:52:13 2023
    On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
    On Wednesday, 3 May 2023 at 04:55:09 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
    On Tuesday, 2 May 2023 at 16:10:08 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
    about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________ …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’
    t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically
    committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================
    For one thing there never was
    supposed to be a Catholic case for the creationist ID scam.

    There always was a Catholic case for the design in nature,
    especially in Thomas Aquinas's writings. Ron O has no good way
    to distinguish between that and the things he grossly distorts below, because he utterly loathes any attempt to argue for God's existence
    in a rational way.

    There have always been some con artists among Catholics (like in any organisation) but Catholics as Church never wanted to participate in that
    particular intelligent design scam

    I glossed over "as Church" last time, but the Roman Catholic Church
    is literally "catholic" and keeps its official dogma to a bare minimum.
    For instance, since Papal Infallibility was (unwisely, IMO) proclaimed
    in the 19th Century, only two to three pronouncements of Popes have
    been declared infallible: the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the
    Assumption of Mary, and probably JPII's announcement that
    the Church has not been authorized by God to make women priests.

    Relevantly: Catholics are allowed to openly claim YEC fundamentalism
    about Genesis 1 and 2 without being accused of heresy.
    This also applies to the opposite extreme, what I call "neo-Deism":
    the position that, after creating our universe just before the Big Bang,
    God gave naturalistic forces a free hand until the time of Abraham or later, when God finally intervened in our universe.


    I see you have bought into the Ron O obsession with his chameleonic speculation about the existence of a scam by the ID movement.
    Rather than getting into its protean variations in this post, I'll be critiquing your idea of "that particular" scam.

    Catholics do not of course say that it is "scam".

    Scammers never say it is a scam, to begin with. But you may be saying
    that Catholics don't say ID is a scam. That may be, but there is great hostility to ID
    among Thomists, and perhaps other neo-Deist Catholics.
    [I forget whether Kenneth Miller is a Catholic; he certainly comes across as a neo-Deist.]

    At the opposite extreme, there is the Catholic ID theorist par excellence, Michael Behe.


    They say something like
    that "ID is theological, not scientific theory and God as directly guiding hand behind evolutionary processes is "God of the gaps" argument."

    Not necessarily a frequent guiding hand. But in any case, they
    are oblivious of ID scientific theory, which makes no such specific
    claims about the designer of any hypothesized design.


    But as teaching theological theories in public school is possible only
    in "comparison of religions" classes not in science classes then fooling people to think that there actually is science is scam.

    Except that there IS science, in early embryonic form. It took secular evolutionistic theory half a century to progress from Lamarck to Darwin,
    and only half that many years have elapsed since Behe launched ID theory in earnest.


    CONTINUED in next reply, to be done soon after I see that this one has appeared.


    Peter Nyikos
    Professor, Dept. of Mathematics
    Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer-- http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

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  • From peter2nyikos@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Thu May 4 07:16:55 2023
    This is the second of three or four replies to a long post.

    On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:
    On Wednesday, 3 May 2023 at 04:55:09 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:25:08 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:

    Most Catholics I know of (in our massively atheist country) say that they
    believe because they feel Jesus participating in their lives,

    You are seeing a highly atypical bunch of Evangelical missionaries.

    You may not be literally seeing them, but if what you say is true,
    the Catholics with whom you are acquainted are probably strongly influenced by them.


    Most Catholics do not allege having such feelings. In fact, an
    increasing percentage have even ceased to think of Jesus as more
    than an admirable individual of our species. Already, a majority
    no longer believe Jesus is present in the Holy Eucharist, never mind
    as a participant in their own lives.

    Why atypical?

    The ones in Estonia are represented in a much greater proportion
    of Catholics than in the USA; and the USA has a bigger proportion than
    are in Western Europe.


    Here most people who do not believe or strongly doubt
    that Jesus is worth praying to just say so.

    "worth praying to" is still typical of almost all Catholics, but
    perhaps a majority feel that the benefit of praying is almost
    completely psychological, rather than Jesus or God granting something
    they ask for. A common rationalization of them and others is that
    prayers are always answered: sometimes Yes, sometimes No, sometimes "Wait."


    There may be some who
    pretend for whatever personal reasons but these are minority.

    You underestimate the power of peer pressure. There is an oft-repeated claim that 70,000 pilgrims saw the sun dance at Fatima on October 13, 1917,
    but I suspect that many of those 70,000 knew that it wasn't the sun they were seeing.
    OTOH hardly any Catholic dares claim that what happened was not a miracle.


    What is the point to pretend? Is there hope to cheat God somehow? Does
    God like lies of courtesy?

    Most Catholics don't think about these questions. Most of their
    prayers are rote recitations: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, etc.
    The only universal rote prayer of Evangelical Protestants is
    the Our Father. They compose their prayers as they go along
    for grace before meals, etc. Catholics almost always say
    a rote prayer before meals, though the rote prayers of different
    languages are different. [But the Hungarian is a literal translation of the German.]


    More to the point of what you asked: here in talk.origins, many non-Christians sneer about "lying for Jesus."

    St. Francis de Sales had to condemn those Catholics who lie
    in the process of arguing for the existence or various actions of God.


    Most non-believers here try to be civil
    about one's right to world view but consider worshipping deities more
    or less kooky.

    That sounds like a holdover from the official atheism of the Soviet Union
    with which generations of children were indoctrinated in schools for 70 years.


    So one claiming being Jew, Christian or Muslim is
    likely actually believing God.

    Or may be like me, still hoping that there is a life after death
    controlled by a benevolent deity, yet intellectually agnostic
    (without admitting it to anyone, unlike me). I have a less
    than 10% confidence that these hopes of mine conform to reality.
    I have less than .01% confidence in the Thomistic notion of an
    omnipotent, omniscient etc. God.

    And yet I maintain my membership in the Roman Catholic Church,
    because I am convinced that it offers the best chance of keeping those
    hopes alive in future generations.


    The theme of the rest of your reply shifted here, and I've deleted it.
    I will reply to it later, before the weekend certainly, and perhaps today.


    Peter Nyikos

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  • From peter2nyikos@gmail.com@21:1/5 to Lawyer Daggett on Thu May 4 18:40:29 2023
    I am a day late, by some standards, with this second reply to a post by Daggett,
    but I don't think he minds the resulting free time.

    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 1:10:09 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 10:15:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:35:08 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
    about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________ …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’
    t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically
    committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
    things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science.


    [snip of more recent text, dealt with in my first reply]


    In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.

    She is honest about both things: the things that ID theorists
    write about qua ID theorists, and the things to which Catholics
    are dogmatically committed.

    If you can find a place in the article where [Gauger] confuses
    the two issues, I'd certainly like to know about it.

    She appears to be honest about not asserting a false narrative
    that makes a fraudulent game of ignoring the reality of one
    while doing the other.

    You need to do something about your habit of making
    excruciatingly general abstract comments.
    Even attentive readers could have a hard time
    figuring out what on earth you are talking about here.


    But I have to wonder at your apparent
    attempt to twist in an insinuation that I questioned her honesty
    as I was applauding it.

    Not only do you NOT "have to wonder at," but wondering is tantamount
    to flirting with the (malicious-seeming) sophistry embodied in the rest of your sentence.

    Were there normal adult give-and-take between us [as I had fervently hoped there would be]
    the most natural interpretation of my words would be the correct one: I thought you
    had read Gauger's sentence a bit hastily, and inferred a connection between the
    part before the dash and the part after the dash that wasn't there,


    It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

    You obviously didn't read far enough to see what I wrote about to your buddy Burkhard:


    As usual, you do not accomplish what you imagine you do.

    As usual against me, you are guilty of false advertisement on two counts. The first is your "As usual"
    and the second is the rest of the claim. I can't prove a negative (in the technical legal sense of the term0
    but the second half is demonstrably false.

    Not only would your claim below be irrelevant if it were true, it's dubious as well.

    More false advertising.

    You addressed the argument to Burkhard so I didn't jump in to refute you.

    Neither did jillery: she jumped in to do a massive snip of what I had written "to make it mean something different," to use Harshman's turn of phrase,
    in another thread late last week.


    You're tried to argue the point with him before,

    Your "the point" is a grand equivocation. I did not talk about "theory"
    or "thesis" in the way I did in the part you had snipped earlier:

    [repeated from far below:]
    _________________________ repost of snipped text___________________
    I told Burkhard last month about a theory that Behe built about the limitations
    of mutation, especially where the malaria parasite is concerned:

    https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/aEWcwKdnhaY/m/b3QDSySsAAAJ
    Re: steady state theory of biological origin
    Apr 18, 2023, 10:20:25 PM
    Behe did this in the book, _The_Edge_of_Evolution_, which Ron O shows
    no signs of ever [having] heard about.

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of repost +++++++++++++++


    and I think you failed.

    You can think anything you want, but here you are guilty of wishful thinking.


    Moreover, you abandoned the argument when you cited chapter and verse examples
    of how you were mistaken.

    This makes no sense at all, and I am calling your bluff: DOCMENT where I did the
    thing to which you are referring.


    Your response was to repeat your ad hominen
    claim that he is a "scientific non-entity" (with the implied self-aggrandized
    implication that you are his superior).

    That's not self-aggrandizement, that's damning myself with faint praise.



    I don't know if he wants anyone to jump in and dispute you. So far, every time he has bothered he's torn you to shreds

    Polemically, with condescending insults even worse than calling
    him a scientific nonentity: mine can be refuted if false,
    his are so generic that they put me in the task of "proving a negative."


    and you've ignored those
    posts and started all over again in different threads.

    Not all over again: continuing my replies to earlier posts
    before tackling the replies to my earlier replies.

    Unlike you and Burkhard, I do not have the luxury of being
    in heated dispute with only one person who is regularly set upon by others; with me, the whole situation is reversed.

    So I need to set priorities, and I put most of them into debates
    where there is some hope of getting new scientific or philosophical insights.The two of you are far down the list. Even Mark Isaak's
    discussion with me about miracles and the reliability of Biblical accounts
    was more productive than what I get from the two of you most of the time.



    By your own methods, if I had jumped in to expose where I thought
    your lines of argument were wrong, you would have retorted with
    complaints about people teaming up to pick on you.

    You are repeating a popular canard without basis in fact, and bordering on libel
    on account of insinuating that it is triggered by mere disagreement.


    Between that
    and Burkhard being quite capable of exposing where you were wrong,
    I figured the best move was to just go buy some popcorn and enjoy the show.

    You sure are humble. Everyone could learn a lesson from the humility
    with which you respond to people.

    The preceding paragraph is a close paraphrase of something you wrote about me this year.
    I suspected it was sarcastic, even though the words of mine that elicited it were much more modest.

    So I gave you the benefit of the doubt, beginning with "Perhaps ..."
    and I'm glad I did, because it earned for me a nice compliment from Hemidactylus,
    even though he ordinarily behaves like an adversary of mine, and a good buddy of yourself and Burkhard.


    The only reason I hedge on this now is that if I had come back
    from 3 weeks hiking around Corfu I might size up the significance
    (more properly the lack of significance) of your attacks and just ignore them until I had some important article to avoid writing.

    Rational refutations of on-topic errors are not attacks. See below to understand
    the difference, if you are capable of such understanding.

    _________________________ repost of snipped text___________________
    I told Burkhard last month about a theory that Behe built about the limitations
    of mutation, especially where the malaria parasite is concerned:

    https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/aEWcwKdnhaY/m/b3QDSySsAAAJ
    Re: steady state theory of biological origin
    Apr 18, 2023, 10:20:25 PM
    Behe did this in the book, _The_Edge_of_Evolution_, which Ron O shows
    no signs of ever [having] heard about.

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++ end of repost +++++++++++++++

    How well do you know that book? Burkhard showed how little he understood about it in the text I preserved in the linked post.

    <crickets>


    Peter Nyikos
    Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
    University of So. Carolina at Columbia
    http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

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  • From Mark Isaak@21:1/5 to Lawyer Daggett on Thu May 4 20:34:36 2023
    On 5/2/23 6:30 AM, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
    about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
    sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t
    mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    A dogmatic commitment to the belief that their God has designed
    things to be as they are is a nice way of admitting that ID is not science. In that aspect, Gauger is far more honest than most.

    It's a shame that those who are dogmatically committed to that belief
    system play the game of pretending that they are open to alternatives
    just so they can falsely claim they are doing science.

    I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for
    Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,
    touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
    why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
    original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

    Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't be.

    --
    Mark Isaak
    "Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
    doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

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  • From =?UTF-8?B?w5bDtiBUaWli?=@21:1/5 to peter2...@gmail.com on Fri May 5 07:41:07 2023
    On Thursday, 4 May 2023 at 16:55:13 UTC+3, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:50:12 AM UTC-4, Öö Tiib wrote:

    I just cut out what I do not feel to have knowledge to respond ... to shorten it a bit.

    Relevantly: Catholics are allowed to openly claim YEC fundamentalism
    about Genesis 1 and 2 without being accused of heresy.
    This also applies to the opposite extreme, what I call "neo-Deism":
    the position that, after creating our universe just before the Big Bang,
    God gave naturalistic forces a free hand until the time of Abraham or later, when God finally intervened in our universe.

    Wisely so. All the story of 20 generations from Adam to Abraham is in disagreement with every evidence we can find on this planet. If such or close enough events took place then (A) not here and/or (B) someone has been
    faking every rock of this planet down to molecular level. It is only sane to say that rocks do not lie and ... so we perhaps do not understand the message in book correctly (if there is one).

    Catholics do not of course say that it is "scam".

    Scammers never say it is a scam, to begin with. But you may be saying
    that Catholics don't say ID is a scam. That may be, but there is great hostility to ID
    among Thomists, and perhaps other neo-Deist Catholics.
    [I forget whether Kenneth Miller is a Catholic; he certainly comes across as a neo-Deist.]

    At the opposite extreme, there is the Catholic ID theorist par excellence, Michael Behe.

    Competing ideas between members of Church indicate that it is capable to evolve.
    I meant that Catholics (regardless if opposing ID or supporting it regardless if sincere
    or scammers) do avoid calling it "that particular scam" like I did. For me ID hope to
    have science is likely sincere ... but claiming there already is something to teach is
    scam.

    But as teaching theological theories in public school is possible only
    in "comparison of religions" classes not in science classes then fooling people to think that there actually is science is scam.

    Except that there IS science, in early embryonic form. It took secular evolutionistic theory half a century to progress from Lamarck to Darwin,
    and only half that many years have elapsed since Behe launched ID theory in earnest.

    These last 3 decades have turned molecular biology from quite an hack into applied
    technical science.
    Other wannabe sciences (like ghost hunting, ancient astronauts or cryptozoology)
    can be in better state than ID. Anyone who searches and researches can find something. But these do not pretend that they have something to teach.

    Snipping part where you explain tendencies and reasoning behind main-stream Catholic world view, thank you.

    Most non-believers here try to be civil
    about one's right to world view but consider worshipping deities more
    or less kooky.

    That sounds like a holdover from the official atheism of the Soviet Union with which generations of children were indoctrinated in schools for 70 years.

    Communists had control here 47 - 50 years (depending on definition of "control").
    We did exist before Soviet Union. We did exist before Christians. We were last corner of Europe that crusaders could conquer. What we have learned ... their deities do not aid them. Also their bigger ships, higher titles, metal armours and bigger numbers can be dealt with. Each time we lost because our leaders were fooled. Only thing of value is wisdom. Any loss is actual only when one fails to learn from it. How could communists teach us? They were mostly illiterate farmers, soldiers and labourers. And ID is similar to Lysenkoism of communists, denial of actual science.

    So one claiming being Jew, Christian or Muslim is
    likely actually believing God.

    Or may be like me, still hoping that there is a life after death
    controlled by a benevolent deity, yet intellectually agnostic
    (without admitting it to anyone, unlike me). I have a less
    than 10% confidence that these hopes of mine conform to reality.
    I have less than .01% confidence in the Thomistic notion of an
    omnipotent, omniscient etc. God.

    I also do not know if there are or not beings from whatever yet unknown dimensions, souls connected to such dimensions, afterlife, rebirth
    whatever. That kind of extraordinary claims are present in different religions very differently, evidence is close to none plus ID does not research such things.

    But lets say there is something. What should Maker of this Universe who ... for example ... decided to connect immortal souls to some interesting
    "meat" here think about ID? ID technically claims in majority of its "evidences" (#3 - #6 of top six) that terraforming and populating a tiny
    piece of rock with that weird "meat" took 4 billions of years of tinkering?

    I would be insulted if so low performance was attributed to me while my
    actual two great engineering achievements were under doubt. (A) making
    universe where such meat can fully boot-strap all on its own and (B) connecting souls to it.

    And yet I maintain my membership in the Roman Catholic Church,
    because I am convinced that it offers the best chance of keeping those
    hopes alive in future generations.

    I am more worried that we argue about things we do not know and leave
    a world where it is impossible to live to our future generations. Hopes to proceed to some other dimensions (or to spread in this one) are none
    for generations that can not exist.

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  • From peter2nyikos@gmail.com@21:1/5 to Mark Isaak on Fri May 5 10:30:58 2023
    On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
    [...]
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things >>> about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward >> and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
    sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t
    mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    <everything from Lawyer Daggett snipped, having already been replied to by me>

    I see you had nothing to say about it here, Mark.

    I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,

    I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute? "Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.

    touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
    why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
    original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

    Thanks for letting us know about this, even though it has nothing to do
    with Intelligent Design (ID) and is not even claiming GodDidIt.
    However, it is relevant to Catholic dogma about the Fall,
    which is rather modest: it ascribes the Fall to a group of humans,
    not necessarily two in number nor closely related.


    Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't be.

    Agreed on that last sentence, even though you were probably sarcastic.

    Do you recall what other details the blub gave about this possibility? Anthropologists have long written about two actual individuals:
    Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. By definition,
    all living humans trace their ancestry via an unbroken maternal
    line to Mitochondrial Eve and via an unbroken paternal line to Y-Chromosomal Adam.

    The full definition adds the following: it entails that Mitochondrial Eve
    had at least two daughters who have both left female descendants today,
    and that Y-Chromosomal Adam had at least two sons, both of whom have
    male descendants today -- both via unbroken lines involving only women and men, respectively.


    Curiously enough, we have a rather precise date for Mitochondrial Eve -- roughly 155,000 years
    ago -- while the estimates for Y-Chromosomal Adam range widely:

    "As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[5]."
    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

    I won't speculate here on the possible reasons for this discrepancy, but
    rather talk about a possibility that occurred to me about an hour ago.
    It envisioned Mitochondrial Eve having all her children from one
    "purebred" descendant of Y-Chromosomal Adam. If that happened,
    we would all be descendants of this one couple.

    I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
    Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was
    broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.


    Peter Nyikos
    Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
    University of So. Carolina at Columbia
    http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From John Harshman@21:1/5 to peter2...@gmail.com on Fri May 5 11:01:02 2023
    On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
    [...]
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote: >>>> On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things >>>>> about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward >>>> and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no >>>> sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t
    mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    <everything from Lawyer Daggett snipped, having already been replied to by me>

    I see you had nothing to say about it here, Mark.

    I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for
    Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,

    I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute? "Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.

    touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
    why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
    original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

    Thanks for letting us know about this, even though it has nothing to do
    with Intelligent Design (ID) and is not even claiming GodDidIt.
    However, it is relevant to Catholic dogma about the Fall,
    which is rather modest: it ascribes the Fall to a group of humans,
    not necessarily two in number nor closely related.


    Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't be.

    Agreed on that last sentence, even though you were probably sarcastic.

    Do you recall what other details the blub gave about this possibility? Anthropologists have long written about two actual individuals:
    Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. By definition,
    all living humans trace their ancestry via an unbroken maternal
    line to Mitochondrial Eve and via an unbroken paternal line to Y-Chromosomal Adam.

    The full definition adds the following: it entails that Mitochondrial Eve
    had at least two daughters who have both left female descendants today,
    and that Y-Chromosomal Adam had at least two sons, both of whom have
    male descendants today -- both via unbroken lines involving only women and men, respectively.


    Curiously enough, we have a rather precise date for Mitochondrial Eve -- roughly 155,000 years
    ago -- while the estimates for Y-Chromosomal Adam range widely:

    "As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[5]."
    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

    I won't speculate here on the possible reasons for this discrepancy, but rather talk about a possibility that occurred to me about an hour ago.
    It envisioned Mitochondrial Eve having all her children from one
    "purebred" descendant of Y-Chromosomal Adam. If that happened,
    we would all be descendants of this one couple.

    While true, that has nothing to do with Gauger's claim. mtEve is the
    ancestor only of your mitochondrial genome, and Y-Adam is the ancestor
    only of your Y chromosome. Their existence has nothing to do with a
    population of 2 only.

    I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
    Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.

    mtEve has nothing to do with biblical Eve or with a population of 2 as
    in Gauger's assertion. And her calculation ignores the genes (MHC,
    mostly) for which we share at least 5 conserved alleles with other primates.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John Harshman@21:1/5 to Lawyer Daggett on Fri May 5 13:49:22 2023
    On 5/5/23 1:17 PM, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 2:05:12 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
    On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
    [...]
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote: >>>>>> On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things >>>>>>> about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no >>>>>> sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t
    mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    <everything from Lawyer Daggett snipped, having already been replied to by me>

    I see you had nothing to say about it here, Mark.

    I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for
    Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,

    I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute? >>> "Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.

    touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
    why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
    original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

    Thanks for letting us know about this, even though it has nothing to do
    with Intelligent Design (ID) and is not even claiming GodDidIt.
    However, it is relevant to Catholic dogma about the Fall,
    which is rather modest: it ascribes the Fall to a group of humans,
    not necessarily two in number nor closely related.


    Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't be. >>>
    Agreed on that last sentence, even though you were probably sarcastic.

    Do you recall what other details the blub gave about this possibility?
    Anthropologists have long written about two actual individuals:
    Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. By definition,
    all living humans trace their ancestry via an unbroken maternal
    line to Mitochondrial Eve and via an unbroken paternal line to Y-Chromosomal Adam.

    The full definition adds the following: it entails that Mitochondrial Eve >>> had at least two daughters who have both left female descendants today,
    and that Y-Chromosomal Adam had at least two sons, both of whom have
    male descendants today -- both via unbroken lines involving only women and men, respectively.


    Curiously enough, we have a rather precise date for Mitochondrial Eve -- roughly 155,000 years
    ago -- while the estimates for Y-Chromosomal Adam range widely:

    "As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[5]."
    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

    I won't speculate here on the possible reasons for this discrepancy, but >>> rather talk about a possibility that occurred to me about an hour ago.
    It envisioned Mitochondrial Eve having all her children from one
    "purebred" descendant of Y-Chromosomal Adam. If that happened,
    we would all be descendants of this one couple.
    While true, that has nothing to do with Gauger's claim. mtEve is the
    ancestor only of your mitochondrial genome, and Y-Adam is the ancestor
    only of your Y chromosome. Their existence has nothing to do with a
    population of 2 only.
    I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what >>> Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
    Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was
    broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.
    mtEve has nothing to do with biblical Eve or with a population of 2 as
    in Gauger's assertion. And her calculation ignores the genes (MHC,
    mostly) for which we share at least 5 conserved alleles with other primates.

    mtEve and Y-Adam never met, and never had any children together, and
    are not a point of genetic restriction from which all of our genes flowed.
    If Gauger implied otherwise, rather than being misrepresented, I'll have
    to modify my earlier comments about her seeming honest with some
    bits about extreme incompetence. I'll add, please don't make me bring
    out lineages of HLA types, cytP450s, immunoglobin and t-cell receptor alleles. Those papers are buried in boxes in a storage unit from before
    pdfs were easily obtained (and they aren't so easy for me to get anymore).


    Why, Lawyer Daggett. Are you secretly Molecular Geneticist Daggett?

    Now, if I recall, Gauger used population genetic data to estimate the
    limits on human population size at various times and discvered that the
    95% confidence limit included "2" if you go back at least 500,000 years.
    As far as I know, this result is correct (again, if you ignore alleles
    that are conserved across species).

    Nothing do do with anything Peter is talking about, which as far as I
    know is also nothing Gauger mentioned.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Lawyer Daggett@21:1/5 to John Harshman on Fri May 5 13:17:13 2023
    On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 2:05:12 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
    On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
    [...]
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things >>>>> about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no >>>> sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger
    had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t
    mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed,
    believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    <everything from Lawyer Daggett snipped, having already been replied to by me>

    I see you had nothing to say about it here, Mark.

    I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for
    Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,

    I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute? "Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.

    touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains
    why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
    original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

    Thanks for letting us know about this, even though it has nothing to do with Intelligent Design (ID) and is not even claiming GodDidIt.
    However, it is relevant to Catholic dogma about the Fall,
    which is rather modest: it ascribes the Fall to a group of humans,
    not necessarily two in number nor closely related.


    Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't be.

    Agreed on that last sentence, even though you were probably sarcastic.

    Do you recall what other details the blub gave about this possibility? Anthropologists have long written about two actual individuals: Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. By definition,
    all living humans trace their ancestry via an unbroken maternal
    line to Mitochondrial Eve and via an unbroken paternal line to Y-Chromosomal Adam.

    The full definition adds the following: it entails that Mitochondrial Eve had at least two daughters who have both left female descendants today, and that Y-Chromosomal Adam had at least two sons, both of whom have
    male descendants today -- both via unbroken lines involving only women and men, respectively.


    Curiously enough, we have a rather precise date for Mitochondrial Eve -- roughly 155,000 years
    ago -- while the estimates for Y-Chromosomal Adam range widely:

    "As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[5]."
    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

    I won't speculate here on the possible reasons for this discrepancy, but rather talk about a possibility that occurred to me about an hour ago.
    It envisioned Mitochondrial Eve having all her children from one "purebred" descendant of Y-Chromosomal Adam. If that happened,
    we would all be descendants of this one couple.
    While true, that has nothing to do with Gauger's claim. mtEve is the ancestor only of your mitochondrial genome, and Y-Adam is the ancestor
    only of your Y chromosome. Their existence has nothing to do with a population of 2 only.
    I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what
    Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
    Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.
    mtEve has nothing to do with biblical Eve or with a population of 2 as
    in Gauger's assertion. And her calculation ignores the genes (MHC,
    mostly) for which we share at least 5 conserved alleles with other primates.

    mtEve and Y-Adam never met, and never had any children together, and
    are not a point of genetic restriction from which all of our genes flowed.
    If Gauger implied otherwise, rather than being misrepresented, I'll have
    to modify my earlier comments about her seeming honest with some
    bits about extreme incompetence. I'll add, please don't make me bring
    out lineages of HLA types, cytP450s, immunoglobin and t-cell receptor
    alleles. Those papers are buried in boxes in a storage unit from before
    pdfs were easily obtained (and they aren't so easy for me to get anymore).

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Lawyer Daggett@21:1/5 to John Harshman on Fri May 5 14:44:06 2023
    On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 4:55:13 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
    On 5/5/23 1:17 PM, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 2:05:12 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
    On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
    [...]
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote: >>>>>>> https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things
    about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no
    sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger >>>>>> had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’
    t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically
    committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    <everything from Lawyer Daggett snipped, having already been replied to by me>

    I see you had nothing to say about it here, Mark.

    I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for >>>> Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,

    I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute?
    "Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.

    touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains >>>> why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two
    original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

    Thanks for letting us know about this, even though it has nothing to do >>> with Intelligent Design (ID) and is not even claiming GodDidIt.
    However, it is relevant to Catholic dogma about the Fall,
    which is rather modest: it ascribes the Fall to a group of humans,
    not necessarily two in number nor closely related.


    Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't be.

    Agreed on that last sentence, even though you were probably sarcastic. >>>
    Do you recall what other details the blub gave about this possibility? >>> Anthropologists have long written about two actual individuals:
    Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. By definition,
    all living humans trace their ancestry via an unbroken maternal
    line to Mitochondrial Eve and via an unbroken paternal line to Y-Chromosomal Adam.

    The full definition adds the following: it entails that Mitochondrial Eve
    had at least two daughters who have both left female descendants today, >>> and that Y-Chromosomal Adam had at least two sons, both of whom have
    male descendants today -- both via unbroken lines involving only women and men, respectively.


    Curiously enough, we have a rather precise date for Mitochondrial Eve -- roughly 155,000 years
    ago -- while the estimates for Y-Chromosomal Adam range widely:

    "As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[5]."
    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

    I won't speculate here on the possible reasons for this discrepancy, but >>> rather talk about a possibility that occurred to me about an hour ago. >>> It envisioned Mitochondrial Eve having all her children from one
    "purebred" descendant of Y-Chromosomal Adam. If that happened,
    we would all be descendants of this one couple.
    While true, that has nothing to do with Gauger's claim. mtEve is the
    ancestor only of your mitochondrial genome, and Y-Adam is the ancestor
    only of your Y chromosome. Their existence has nothing to do with a
    population of 2 only.
    I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what
    Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
    Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was >>> broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.
    mtEve has nothing to do with biblical Eve or with a population of 2 as
    in Gauger's assertion. And her calculation ignores the genes (MHC,
    mostly) for which we share at least 5 conserved alleles with other primates.

    mtEve and Y-Adam never met, and never had any children together, and
    are not a point of genetic restriction from which all of our genes flowed. If Gauger implied otherwise, rather than being misrepresented, I'll have to modify my earlier comments about her seeming honest with some
    bits about extreme incompetence. I'll add, please don't make me bring
    out lineages of HLA types, cytP450s, immunoglobin and t-cell receptor alleles. Those papers are buried in boxes in a storage unit from before pdfs were easily obtained (and they aren't so easy for me to get anymore).

    Why, Lawyer Daggett. Are you secretly Molecular Geneticist Daggett?

    Now, if I recall, Gauger used population genetic data to estimate the
    limits on human population size at various times and discvered that the
    95% confidence limit included "2" if you go back at least 500,000 years.
    As far as I know, this result is correct (again, if you ignore alleles
    that are conserved across species).

    Sure, as long as you ignore the data that completely destroys the results
    of a trite methodology, you can pretend the trite methodology gave a
    sensible result.

    I am also algorithm developer Daggett. I am large, I contain multitudes.
    Far too many methods used in the broad field of bioinformatics use
    spherical cow approximations. Far too few apply reality checks to their algorithms, and the use of published algorithms.

    This used to matter to me when I had an interest in HLA/MHC types
    and subtype specificity related to vaccine design and optimization
    of pre-clinical trial design using macaques as a model species. But
    that now seems like a lifetime ago.

    Just to drop a bomb, one of the problems with the simplistic algorithms
    is that they don't account for a strong positive selection for diversity
    in certain genes. And it isn't trivial to do so.

    Nothing do do with anything Peter is talking about, which as far as I
    know is also nothing Gauger mentioned.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John Harshman@21:1/5 to Lawyer Daggett on Fri May 5 16:56:06 2023
    On 5/5/23 2:44 PM, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 4:55:13 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
    On 5/5/23 1:17 PM, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
    On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 2:05:12 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
    On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, May 4, 2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
    [...]
    On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote: >>>>>>>>> https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/

    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be claiming things >>>>>>>>> about an ID scam that never existed.
    The above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O shows no >>>>>>>> sign of comprehending the first thing about.

    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger >>>>>>>> had written such things as:

    ____________________ excerpt 1____________________________
    …Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’
    t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically
    committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
    =========================== end of first excerpt ===========================

    <everything from Lawyer Daggett snipped, having already been replied to by me>

    I see you had nothing to say about it here, Mark.

    I find it interesting, but not at all surprising, that the Center for >>>>>> Science and Culture, an intelligent design promoting organization,

    I keep forgetting: is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute?
    "Evolution News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery Institute.

    touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A biologist explains >>>>>> why it is indeed possible that the entire human race came from two >>>>>> original parents." Under a picture of Adam and Eve.

    Thanks for letting us know about this, even though it has nothing to do >>>>> with Intelligent Design (ID) and is not even claiming GodDidIt.
    However, it is relevant to Catholic dogma about the Fall,
    which is rather modest: it ascribes the Fall to a group of humans,
    not necessarily two in number nor closely related.


    Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't be.

    Agreed on that last sentence, even though you were probably sarcastic. >>>>>
    Do you recall what other details the blub gave about this possibility? >>>>> Anthropologists have long written about two actual individuals:
    Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. By definition,
    all living humans trace their ancestry via an unbroken maternal
    line to Mitochondrial Eve and via an unbroken paternal line to Y-Chromosomal Adam.

    The full definition adds the following: it entails that Mitochondrial Eve >>>>> had at least two daughters who have both left female descendants today, >>>>> and that Y-Chromosomal Adam had at least two sons, both of whom have >>>>> male descendants today -- both via unbroken lines involving only women and men, respectively.


    Curiously enough, we have a rather precise date for Mitochondrial Eve -- roughly 155,000 years
    ago -- while the estimates for Y-Chromosomal Adam range widely:

    "As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[5]."
    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

    I won't speculate here on the possible reasons for this discrepancy, but >>>>> rather talk about a possibility that occurred to me about an hour ago. >>>>> It envisioned Mitochondrial Eve having all her children from one
    "purebred" descendant of Y-Chromosomal Adam. If that happened,
    we would all be descendants of this one couple.
    While true, that has nothing to do with Gauger's claim. mtEve is the
    ancestor only of your mitochondrial genome, and Y-Adam is the ancestor >>>> only of your Y chromosome. Their existence has nothing to do with a
    population of 2 only.
    I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly what
    Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the
    Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line was >>>>> broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.
    mtEve has nothing to do with biblical Eve or with a population of 2 as >>>> in Gauger's assertion. And her calculation ignores the genes (MHC,
    mostly) for which we share at least 5 conserved alleles with other primates.

    mtEve and Y-Adam never met, and never had any children together, and
    are not a point of genetic restriction from which all of our genes flowed. >>> If Gauger implied otherwise, rather than being misrepresented, I'll have >>> to modify my earlier comments about her seeming honest with some
    bits about extreme incompetence. I'll add, please don't make me bring
    out lineages of HLA types, cytP450s, immunoglobin and t-cell receptor
    alleles. Those papers are buried in boxes in a storage unit from before
    pdfs were easily obtained (and they aren't so easy for me to get anymore). >>>
    Why, Lawyer Daggett. Are you secretly Molecular Geneticist Daggett?

    Now, if I recall, Gauger used population genetic data to estimate the
    limits on human population size at various times and discvered that the
    95% confidence limit included "2" if you go back at least 500,000 years.
    As far as I know, this result is correct (again, if you ignore alleles
    that are conserved across species).

    Sure, as long as you ignore the data that completely destroys the results
    of a trite methodology, you can pretend the trite methodology gave a
    sensible result.

    It's not a problem for the bulk of the data just to assume neutrality,
    and that's not a bad way to estimate past population sizes. Only a comparatively small number of sites are being maintained by selection,
    and an even smaller amount of allelic diversity is being maintained by balancing selection. No need to take that into account when estimating
    past population sizes. What it can do is increase the minimum possible population size. But is such a small bottleneck even credible, even if
    it were technically consistent with the data? Almost certainly not. The
    most likely outcome of an extreme bottleneck is extinction.

    I am also algorithm developer Daggett. I am large, I contain multitudes.
    Far too many methods used in the broad field of bioinformatics use
    spherical cow approximations. Far too few apply reality checks to their algorithms, and the use of published algorithms.

    This used to matter to me when I had an interest in HLA/MHC types
    and subtype specificity related to vaccine design and optimization
    of pre-clinical trial design using macaques as a model species. But
    that now seems like a lifetime ago.

    Just to drop a bomb, one of the problems with the simplistic algorithms
    is that they don't account for a strong positive selection for diversity
    in certain genes. And it isn't trivial to do so.

    Nothing do do with anything Peter is talking about, which as far as I
    know is also nothing Gauger mentioned.


    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Athel Cornish-Bowden@21:1/5 to Lawyer Daggett on Sat May 6 11:49:41 2023
    On 2023-05-05 20:17:13 +0000, Lawyer Daggett said:

    On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 2:05:12 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
    On 5/5/23 10:30 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:> > On Thursday, May 4,
    2023 at 11:35:10 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:> > [...]> >>> On Tuesday,
    May 2, 2023 at 9:10:08 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:> >>>> On
    Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 9:05:34 PM UTC-4, RonO wrote:> >>>>>
    https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/here-is-what-we-mean-by-intelligent-design-and-what-we-dont/>
    Ann Gauger has a really lame article that seems to be
    claiming things> >>>>> about an ID scam that never existed.> >>>> The
    above sentence is Ron O's idiotic take on a perfectly straightforward>
    and intelligently written, well organized article which Ron O
    shows no> >>>> sign of comprehending the first thing about.> >>>>> >>>>
    You would never think, from what Ron O writes below, that Gauger> >>>>
    had written such things as:> >>>>> >>>> ____________________ excerpt
    1____________________________> >>>> …Intelligent design (ID) proponents
    typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features
    of the universe and of living things are best explained by an
    intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this
    doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes
    and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that
    it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to
    which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that
    all things originate in God.> >>>> =========================== end of
    first excerpt ===========================> >> > <everything from Lawyer
    Daggett snipped, having already been replied to by me>> >> > I see you
    had nothing to say about it here, Mark.> >> >> I find it interesting,
    but not at all surprising, that the Center for> >> Science and Culture,
    an intelligent design promoting organization,> >> > I keep forgetting:
    is it the same organization as the Discovery Institute?> > "Evolution
    News", which published Ann Gauger's article, is published by Discovery
    Institute.> >> >> touted Gauger's book on Facebook with the text, "A
    biologist explains> >> why it is indeed possible that the entire human
    race came from two> >> original parents." Under a picture of Adam and
    Eve.> >> > Thanks for letting us know about this, even though it has
    nothing to do> > with Intelligent Design (ID) and is not even claiming
    GodDidIt.> > However, it is relevant to Catholic dogma about the Fall,>
    which is rather modest: it ascribes the Fall to a group of humans,> >
    not necessarily two in number nor closely related.> >> >> >>
    Intelligent design linked with biblical creationism? Nah, it couldn't
    Agreed on that last sentence, even though you were probably
    sarcastic.> >> > Do you recall what other details the blub gave about
    this possibility?> > Anthropologists have long written about two actual
    individuals:> > Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. By
    definition,> > all living humans trace their ancestry via an unbroken
    maternal> > line to Mitochondrial Eve and via an unbroken paternal line
    to Y-Chromosomal Adam.> >> > The full definition adds the following: it
    entails that Mitochondrial Eve> > had at least two daughters who have
    both left female descendants today,> > and that Y-Chromosomal Adam had
    at least two sons, both of whom have> > male descendants today -- both
    via unbroken lines involving only women and men, respectively.> >> >> >
    Curiously enough, we have a rather precise date for Mitochondrial Eve
    -- roughly 155,000 years> > ago -- while the estimates for
    Y-Chromosomal Adam range widely:> >> > "As of 2015, estimates of the
    age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly
    consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[5]."> > --
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam> >> > I won't
    speculate here on the possible reasons for this discrepancy, but> >
    rather talk about a possibility that occurred to me about an hour ago.>
    It envisioned Mitochondrial Eve having all her children from one> >
    "purebred" descendant of Y-Chromosomal Adam. If that happened,> > we
    would all be descendants of this one couple.
    While true, that has nothing to do with Gauger's claim. mtEve is the>
    ancestor only of your mitochondrial genome, and Y-Adam is the ancestor>
    only of your Y chromosome. Their existence has nothing to do with a>
    population of 2 only.
    I claim no priority for this idea. For all I know, it could be exactly
    what> > Gauger explained in the book. It is even compatible with the> >
    Biblical "And Cain knew his wife" -- a woman whose matrilineal line
    broken somewhere in the ancestry of all living humans.
    mtEve has nothing to do with biblical Eve or with a population of 2 as>
    in Gauger's assertion. And her calculation ignores the genes (MHC,>
    mostly) for which we share at least 5 conserved alleles with other
    primates.

    mtEve and Y-Adam never met, and never had any children together, and
    are not a point of genetic restriction from which all of our genes flowed.

    Yes. If we discount highly untypical periods like the 19th century, a
    typical woman has had at most three surviving daughters. A man, on the
    other hand, will have had zero surviving sons in most cases, and up to
    200 in extreme cases. It follws that Y-chromosome Adam lived much more
    recently than mitochondrial Eve, so they could not have met.

    If Gauger implied otherwise, rather than being misrepresented, I'll have
    to modify my earlier comments about her seeming honest with some
    bits about extreme incompetence. I'll add, please don't make me bring
    out lineages of HLA types, cytP450s, immunoglobin and t-cell receptor alleles. Those papers are buried in boxes in a storage unit from before
    pdfs were easily obtained (and they aren't so easy for me to get anymore).


    --
    athel cb : Biochemical Evolution, Garland Science, 2016

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