Comments on: Antievolutionists Wrong About Darwin Yet Again

By: Daylight Atheism > The Case for a Creator: Complexity Is Scary!

Daylight Atheism > The Case for a Creator: Complexity Is Scary! — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:36:39 +0000

[...] complexity" implied by what he could see of cells' organization and behavior. For details, see this post by Wesley Elsberry, which also catalogues the sloppy anti-evolutionists repeating this [...]

By: Christopher Wing

Christopher Wing — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:30:41 +0000

Why do creationists need the rest of us to believe them? Why must stupidity publicly out itself in this manner? Can’t people who would have functioned better in the 1600′s just keep their damaging ideas to themselves?

Ugh!

By: Austringer

Austringer — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:56:09 +0000

It isn’t simple disagreement that will get anyone booted. That appears in any number of comments that I have approved here. Disagreeable-ness, as it were, is what will cause your comment to get scrubbed just as surely as clean-up will happen if you walk into my living room and spit on the floor.

This isn’t all that difficult a concept, I wouldn’t think, except to the incorrigibly disagreeable.

BTW, if you were going to disagree, the topic is the historical claim made by clueless antievolutionists that Darwin didn’t appreciate that sub-cellular organization implied complexity.

By: Viorelas

Viorelas — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 13:31:24 +0000

“Comment Policy
I consider this weblog an extension of my living room in cyberspace. If you enter a comment that I wouldn’t find acceptable in my living room, I’m likely to boot both you and your comment. Fair warning, OK?”

Well, very interesting discussion site. If I find your comment acceptable, i.e. as I understand, contrary to my belief, I’ll delete it. Very interesting…

By: Christian Stiehl

Christian Stiehl — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:47:45 +0000

I’d also point out that treating a cell as a “black box”, when you don’t really know what’s inside it or what its internal mechanisms are, is entirely proper. It’s fine to say that the cell does X, Y, and Z, and it simply does them *somehow*, with the implicit understanding that, as science advances, we’ll be able to get to those as-yet unknown mechanisms. By analogy, you don’t have to know that a proton is made up of quarks to be able to study how protons interact with the atomic nucleus.

A further error is to mischaracterize the concept of the black box itself. To say that you’re treating an object or process as a black box is to say nothing about the complexity within the box. The guts of the box may be fundamentally simple or fantastically complex. For the purposes of the current discussion, you’re simply ignoring all that and focusing on what goes in, and what comes out.

If, in fact, Darwin were to treat the cell as a black box, it does not follow that he therefore thinks it’s simple protoplasm. Nor does it follow that, by treating it as a black box, he’d have missed crucial evidence that invalidated this evolutionary theory. While this could have been the case, the opposite has been shown to be true: the molecular evidence revealed by prying open that black box is some of the most convincing confirmation of common descent and variation.

By: Troy Britain

Troy Britain — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:01:09 +0000

Eric pretty much beat me to it…

While Darwin was completely wrong about the actual mechanism of inheritance he was right about it being particulate rather than blended (blended inheritance being the dominant view of the time and one that was used to deny the efficacy of natural selection).

As funny as the idea of gemmules may sound to us (with our 20/20 hindsight), the idea that every cell basically contained the blueprint for the entire body (rather than just for itself) would have struck biologists of the mid-19th century as being rather strange as well.

By: Eric Saveau

Eric Saveau — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:48:19 +0000

What’s really interesting about Darwin’s wrong idea is that it was actually in the right ballpark. He was postulating a biochemical means, contained within living cells, of passing on traits from generation to generation. Essentially, he was hypothesizing something roughly analogous to chromosomes.

His specifics were wrong, but his basic idea was both forward-thinking and, and you point out, demonstrates that he was both smart enough to recognize that such a mechanism likely existed and industrious enough to try to discover and understand it – that is, to test his hypothesis.

In other words, a scientist.

By: Reed A. Cartwright

Reed A. Cartwright — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:32:37 +0000

Remember to submit this when the nominations are opened for next year’s the open lab.

By: afarensis, FCD

afarensis, FCD — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:52:21 +0000

Yup, Darwin was a cutting edge scientist no matter what subject he was thinking about.