I’m going to link to a post on Uncommon Descent. I try to avoid that, because I think it is a vile harbor of malign idiocy, but Dembski has just put up something that I think is merely sincerely ignorant. That’s worth correcting. It also highlights the deficiencies of Dembski’s understanding of biology.
Dembski makes a strange argument for ID on the basis of a certain class of experiments in developmental biology.
For example, consider how SCNT (somatic cell nuclear transfer) works. You take a mammalian egg (which “just happens to be” a HUGE cell, very easy to experiment on). You take out the nucleus. (Think about how INCREDIBLY ARTIFICIAL that is.) You take an ENTIRE SOMATIC CELL (not just the nucleus—that’s one of the “tricks of the trade”) and you insert it into the enucleated egg cell. The “headless” (no nucleus, no genome, etc.) egg cell proceeds to break down/destroy the non-nucleic parts of the somatic cell. It then “gets ahold of” the somatic nucleus. It then proceeds to “reprogram” the nucleus to express the appropriate genes for embryonic life.
If all goes well (and often it doesn’t—in this case, nature fails to act “always or for the most part” in the famous phrase of Aristotle), a [fairly] normal embryo starts developing. But how can an enucleated egg possibly “know how to” do that? Such an occurrence has never happened in the entire history of life on earth. And yet it works—yes, only once in awhile, but it’s absolutely impossible that it could work AT ALL on Darwinian principles because the organism has never before encountered a circumstance in its natural history where this capability could have been selected for.
I know everyone who knows any basic cell biology is gawping in disbelief at that. This occurrence has never happened in the history of life? It happens all the time. The nuclei of your liver cells and skin cells and brain cells contain pretty much the same genetic material as the cells in your gonads. The egg ‘knows’ how to do that because every egg since the metazoan dawn of time has received the same ol’ ordinary genetic material that every other cell also receives, and then proceeds to differentiate along a path that enables the appropriate set of genes for an oocyte. Cells that were unable to do that did not become eggs and did not contribute to the next generation.
We even have a technical term for a more general aspect of the phenomenon: transfate. Cells respond to signals in their environment and respond by changing their prospective pattern of development. This is an artificial and extreme example, but it really is just an expression of the consequences of normal patterns of development. The scientists who are doing SCNT are taking advantage of a natural developmental mechanism to do their work for them.
Similarly, the ability of the egg to remove extranuclear material is treated as something magical, that never occurs in the natural world. Hello, fertilization? This fusion is exactly what happens when the sperm meets the egg.
Dembski thinks this expected capability is a disproof of evolution. This sounds a lot like the extravagant claims made for “irreducible complexity”…which also turned out to be a predicted expectation of genetic mechanisms.
I think the list has underappreciated (if I may sound a bit peevish a point I’ve made several times, namely, that any ability that an organism has to adapt to a highly, highly artificial constraint is a de facto disproof of the (complete adequacy of) neo-Darwinism. If an organism can adapt readily to an artificially induced change that has no analog in nature, than that adaptability cannot be explained (or explained away, or hand-waved-over) by random variation and natural selection. By hypothesis there is no place in natural history where such a capability could have arisen “naturally” (in the Darwinian sense).
This is absurd. Basically what Dembski is arguing here is that if organisms are not absolutely rigid and inflexible in their development, incapable of responding to variation in their environment, then evolution is wrong. He ignores (or more likely, is completely unaware of) everything we’ve known about basic developmental biology for a century and a half—the concept of regulation seems likely to freak poor Bill Dembski out, and I fear the mention of the words evo-devo and eco-devo would cause his head to ka-splode.
There’s another very strange implication in Dembski’s post. He seems to think that the ability of transplanted nuclei to transform cells must have been specifically conferred upon our cells by his mythical Designer, for a specific purpose. What would that be? Has Mr Dembski just endorsed embryo cloning and experimentation?
I noticed something similar about spoon dangling.
You start by placing a spoon against the tip of your nose. If all goes well (and often it doesn’t), the spoon actually hangs on your nose for a period of time. But how can a piece of tableware possibly “know how to” do that? Such an occurrence was never anticipated in the entire history of tableware design. And yet it works–yes, only once in awhile, but it’s absolutely impossible that it could work AT ALL on Darwinian principles because that spoon has never encountered a circumstance in its natural history where this capability could have been selected for.
To what purpose has the flying spaghetti monster conferred this (albeit unreliable) capacity for spoons to dangle off one’s nose?
This is a biology blog, man. You should have noted the amazing impossibility of noses evolving a capacity to support an artificial construct like a spoon.
And eyeglasses! How could we have been so blind not to notice that there is no natural reason for a nose to protrude other than as a support for glasses!
Speaking of spoons knowing how to hang on a nose (the answer, of course, is that our noses were Intelligently designed to fit into spoons, just like with glasses), have you ever considered how a thermos keeps hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold? Like, how does it know, maaaaaan?
Would like to see something like PZMyersZone with the godless liberal making Dembski’s head a splode. Would have to keep the ladies off of him, though.
And PZ and I come up with the same thing about spoons. So, does this make me a great mind?
“Such an occurrence [somatic cell nuclear transfer] has never happened in the entire history of life on earth.” Whoa. That’s just…whoa. Dumb. Dumb, Wild Bill! I remember learning about this in high school–where’s he been? Usually it takes me a while to parse Dembksi’s arguments to see what he’s doing wrong (and forget all the bogus math), but…geez. Even I know better than this, and I’m a stupid secretary.
The poster also seems to think that the ability to flip ones visual experience upside down must have been specifically conferred upon our bodies for a specific purpose. Which purpose?
Don’t you just love when an IDiot take an argument against design and blithely converts it to its opposite? I wish science was that simple.
Might as well provide a portal to someone else’s entries on Dembski’s bad math while pumping my site traffic here on Pharyngula.
Here’s a bold concept for Dembski to digest: perhaps we adapt those highly artificially constrained procedures to the organism, rather than vice versa.
Clearly, he thinks that this system was designed by Go… sorry, the Nonspecified Designer Who Might Be A Space Alien (Wink Wink)… to provide de facto disproof of the (complete adequacy of) neo-Darwinism.
Notice his irony-quotes in “which ‘just happens to be’ a HUGE cell, very easy to experiment on”. You see, the NDWMBASAWW made the cells large enough for us to experiment on so that we would eventually discover the designed ability to cope with our artifical experiments, thereby sending a signal to us of His/Her/Its/Their existence.
Just like how the NDWMBASAWW also designed the banana to fit our hand.
He makes a hidden assumption that, if we bring it out of hiding, explains his error: he assumes that the nucleus is in direct control over all cellular function. Obviously it isn’t — there’s plenty of undirected chemistry going on in the cell, and it’s clearly sufficient to handle this process.
The thing about mystics is that they always want a special place to hold a source of all intent, even (it seems) in things that have no intentional capacity.
Paging Dr. Pangloss…
Dembski himself seems to be an obvious example of (flawed) design. Couldn’t his skewed perception of things biological be the result of some neural hardwiring that only allows him to see problems that don’t exist?
Or could it be the glasses?
For an example from nature, I don’t think an espalier fruit tree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espalier “happened in the entire history of life on earth” and if it did, I doubt its rootstock was grafted from an entirely different kind of tree. How can the tree “know how to” connect itself to foreign rootstock? If the ability to graft is part of intelligent design, why didn’t the designer just make all tree roots resistant to fungus, nematodes, etc.?
Yes, living things respond robustly to all kinds of unforeseen circumstances. Evolution could not occur if this were not so. If Dembski’s point is that living things are cool, I agree whole-heartedly. If he’s trying to make some other point, then I have no idea what he’s getting at.
Perhaps he needs a nose job.
Bob
Has William the Peevish – or any of the other IDiots, come to that – ever responded to Mill’s argument that any evidence of design is evidence of a being of limited powers, in other words, one who could not be the Christian God?
P Z Myers wrote
…then I need the number for the ID Complaints Department because they did a lousy job on mine!
The part that made me laugh was in Dembski’s intro:
“… but I would like to see the insights below vigorously discussed on this blog.”
Especially since if, as a commenter, you do not please the Imperious Leader of the blog, you will be summarily excised:
I’m taking you off the moderation list. Your comments will henceforward appear immediately. Don’t make me regret it. -ds
I’m not sure that Dembski is really that ignorant. It seems to me that he likes to throw little bits of scientific-sounding specious nonesense out in front of his little band of sycophants in order to make himself seem like he knows what he’s talking about, and so they they’ll spread the vile seeds all over the place. It’s like he opens the door, throws the dogs a piece of stinky meat, then slams the door shut and watches gleefully from the window as they voraciously devour it then sit and wait for more.
One other thought – it occurs to me that William the Peevish himself stands as evidence against an omnipotent and omniscient God. Only an incompetent designer could have created an academic with such a poor grasp of the theory of evolution.
I’m just glad I read this because I never really learned how to spell kaslode until now.
Is he trying to disprove evolution or intelligent design? The points he tries to make sound more like an explanation of why designing organisms for a specific purpose doesn’t work. Designed stuff is rigid and inflexible because its supposed to fit one situation and one thing only. But when traits pop up at random, there’s no telling how they will respond to new environmental situations. Thats the whole point really, is that mutations with unexpected (i.e. not designed) side effects that sometimes have a beneficial effect on fitness in a new environmental situation. He’s been thinking that stuff really is designed for too long and actually stumbled on the logical problem of having designed organisms. If organisms are designed to fit their environment, then anything designed has a lack of adaptability to an artificial situation.
Paul wrote:
“Dembski makes a strange argument for ID on the basis of a certain class of experiments in developmental biology.”
Am I missing something? Dr. Dembski clearly stated:
“A colleague of mine posted this on list to which I subscribe. It raises some interesting questions about the limits of adaptability, the limits to preadaptation/exaptation, and the extent to which selection presupposes adaptability. I’m not sure I buy the entire argument here (see the post on this blog about the evolution of nylonase), but I would like to see the insights below vigorously discussed on this blog.”
You seem to be attributing these words to Dembski, but it looks to me like he is quoting another blogger and in addition, states that he doesn’t “buy the entire argument” and invites discussion.
Is your brain addled (any more than usual) by the pressure of grading or are you being deliberately deceptive?
“It occurs to me that William the Peevish himself stands as evidence against an omnipotent and omniscient God…” Ian, don’t turn that corner! Dembski already has an argument prepared, natch. He says that intelligent [sic] design is not “optimal design.” In other words, the Intelligent Designer sometimes “acts stupidly.” Yes, that’s a quote. Pretty or ugly (and I don’t think Dembski’s that bad looking), with glasses or without, upside-down or backwards, “headless” eggs and heads on Mount Rushmore, every blasted phenomenon “proves” ID for him. And naturally, because “this is a fallen world,” nonoptimal design is our fault somehow. Yep, this is about “science,” because I doubt many believers out there want a doofus for a deity.
The key puzzle piece you left out of your criticism of Dembski is answering the question, “how does the ovum do this without a nucleus”. That, I think, is the crux of his point, that in nature ova have nuclei, so when comparing the ability of a normal ovum to an ennucleated one, it’s not fair to say “they do this all the time”, since normally they do it with a nucleus.
If you can show that the ability of the ovum to react to the presence of foreign DNA is not fully dependent on the presence of its own nucleus, then his argument is done. Of course, in some sense there’s no need: if it is able to be done without a nucleus, than it should be able to be done with or without a nucleus, and so ova evolved to do this with or without a nucleus, and that’s it. But if you can explain the mechanism of how they do it, it’d really put a the final nail of understanding in his coffin of confusion.
Paul wrote:
“The nuclei of your liver cells and skin cells and brain cells contain pretty much the same genetic material as the cells in your gonads. The egg ‘knows’ how to do that because every egg since the metazoan dawn of time has received the same ol’ ordinary genetic material that every other cell also receives, and then proceeds to differentiate along a path that enables the appropriate set of genes for an oocyte.”
Indeed.
The information needed to direct development along every possible pathway, to respond to every possible change in the environment, is present in every single cell and has been since the “metazoan dawn of time”.
Sounds an awful lot like front-loading to me.
What you call evolution is the unfolding of a program that was present in the primordal DNA when it first arrived on earth from elsewhere. All of the information to produce every organism, along every evolutionary pathway, in every environmental situation was present from the very beginning.
That argument is so stupid that I didn’t even think of it.
The cytoplasm is a rich source of metabolic activity, obviously enough. Many cells can keep chugging away for weeks in the absence of a nucleus (erythrocytes, for instance). Other cells have such large cytoplasmic volumes — neurons — that the rates of transport mean it is weeks or more before chemical signals can be exchanged between the soma and the periphery. The nucleus is a programmable archive, not a factory.
Charlie, every time I see something dumb and insane from some creationist, you come along to show that I haven’t yet plumbed the bottom of the barrel.
I think know a guy who’ll give you a million dollars if you can prove that.
“I fear the mention of the words evo-devo and eco-devo would cause his head to ka-splode.”
If only it were that easy.
Paul wrote:
“Charlie, every time I see something dumb and insane from some creationist, you come along to show that I haven’t yet plumbed the bottom of the barrel.”
Your mind of wisdom realizes the full extent of objects of knowledge,
Your eloquent speech is the ear-ornament of the fortunate,
Your beautiful body is ablaze with the glory of renown.
I prostrate to you, whom to see, to hear, and to remember is so meaningful.
Hmm, wonder how Dembski would interpret this bit of biology:
Early humans, chimps were mates
Charlie Wagner:
Depending on your definition of “information” and “present” this could be vacuously true, but not very meaningful.
To use an analogy, suppose I had an old IBM 360 (introduced in 1964) in working condition. Nothing would stop me from programming it to run an algorithm to crack DVD encryption, though it might be slow. This is despite the fact that DeCSS, a controversial crack of DVD encryption did not exist until after DVDs were invented (long after 1964) and clearly the DVD industry thought their encryption was good enough at the time.
Do I conclude that old IBM computers were “frontloaded” with “all of the information” to run DeCSS? No, all I have demonstrated is that computers are universal machines. Having a computer is not the same as having all potentially useful software for it, except in the vacuous sense that I could enumerate all strings that represent computer programs.
Living cells are, likewise, universal constructors within a certain domain of constructable forms. Once you have a cell that can differentiate into a sponge or jellyfish, you probably have one that can differentiate into all kinds of other things nobody can anticipate.
That argument is so stupid that I didn’t even think of it. The cytoplasm is a rich source of metabolic activity, obviously enough.
I wasn’t saying that Dembski was saying that the nucleus is needed to live, but that it is needed to provide the instructions for how to chew up the non-nuclear bits of the foreign cell and use the new DNA. I don’t think it is obvious that there are cytoplasmic players which will be able to do this without gene transcription–I imagine it has to be possible, since cloning works–but I just don’t know enough about how the new DNA gets “situated” in the ennucleated cell and read out. I guess I am confused as to what is left in the cell to do transcription of the foreign DNA if the host cell is ennucleated (I mean does it need new polymerase, tRNAs and such to be made?)
I’m sorry I don’t have a clearer view of this, but maybe others of us don’t and it would be helpful to understand this better? (and in case it is not clear, I think Dembski’s point is a very bad and misguided one).
Actually.. A more blatently obvious flaw in this logic arises. mRNA. You know, the stuff geneticists are using to map our ancestry lines into Africa, since it doesn’t change over time. Guess what… This lies “outside” the nucleus, which is “why” it is passed on by the female, as part of the egg. If you remove the nucleus, which does all the heavy, “This is going to be a blah.”, part, it doesn’t make the cell stop working, any more than deleting the OS from your computer makes the BIOS stop working or prevents it from booting from a floppy, CD or completely different OS. Though, I suppose some clown might argue that this is proof of design, based on the analogy I used to describe it… Such people are beyond hope. lol
Paul C wrote:
“Living cells are, likewise, universal constructors within a certain domain of constructable forms. Once you have a cell that can differentiate into a sponge or jellyfish, you probably have one that can differentiate into all kinds of other things nobody can anticipate.”
As you well know, there are two necessary components, the hardware and the software. The protein synthetic apparatus can construct any biochemical maschine, however great its complexity, just so long as its functional units are comprised of proteins. Because of the tremendous number of uses that proteins can be put, it has almost limitless potential, provided it is given the correct information..
The software must also on board, in the form of genetic and epigenetic potential. The dynamic interaction of the software, the hardware and the environment act together to create the structures, processes and systems that make up living organisms.
Dembski writes/quotes:
Tell us, Mr. Dembski, how much adaptability *is* reasonably expected on an evolutionary basis? How much is expected on an Intelligent Design basis?
It looks like he’s fallen into the same fallacy here that he does when, say, rejecting exaptation or cooption: he thinks that every molecule/cell/organ does its main job and nothing else. He thinks that there’s no way a transmembrane protein could just happen to facilitate motion; there’s no way the normal cell regulatory and specialization behavior could just so happen to allow SCNT; there’s no way a heat-exchanging skin flap could just happen to have wing-like aerodynamics. But that’s just not true: all complex molecules have side-reactions, all appendages have some sort of aerodynamic and heat-exchange consequences, and all complex regulatory networks will do something complex when jiggered.
Imagine an IDer saying, “Hemoglobin supposedly evolved to bind oxygen molecules. If so, how’d it become so good at binding carbon monoxide?? There was no selective pressure for that!!” Or “The aorta can apparently heal after open-heart surgery. How did that evolve, when our ancestors never HAD open heart-surgery?”
Actually.. A more blatently obvious flaw in this logic arises. mRNA. You know, the stuff geneticists are using to map our ancestry lines into Africa, since it doesn’t change over time. Guess what… This lies “outside” the nucleus, which is “why” it is passed on by the female, as part of the egg.
You’re thinking of mitchondrial DNA. Which is not mRNA.
mRNA–messenger RNA–depends on DNA for its production. It is also degraded by processes in the cell, which means it doesn’t always hang around too long in the cytoplasm. Decay rates of different mRNAs vary. So it could be the case that ennucleation shouldn’t work if the necessary mRNAs don’t hang around long enough to allow the appropriate proteins to be made. Or maybe they do. Open question to me, but one that is probably known by cloning geneticists.
If you remove the nucleus, which does all the heavy, “This is going to be a blah.”, part, it doesn’t make the cell stop working, any more than deleting the OS from your computer makes the BIOS stop working
No, but you have to admit there are many functions of the computer that are impossible without the OS. In the same way, without a nucleus you might expect neurons to not be able to do long term plasticity (changing), since that seems to be new protein synthesis dependent, so requires a nucleus. Likewise, receiving the sperm or a foreign cell may require new protein synthesis and thus a nucleus. I don’t think it does, I just don’t know why it doesn’t.
Sorry Charlie, but such systems can produce interesting results even if you give them “incorrect” information and what might kill a multi-cell organism, like misproducing toxins that get released and kill other cells, can actually be an “advantage” to a single cell organism. Its only if you combine an inability to self replicate and multicellular systems with such a system would deem “bad” information that you are 100% certain to produce what doesn’t work at all. There may be a finite number of possible working solutions, but that set of solution may contain billions of possible permutations, any one of which will work in the limited capacity of a given system. What we have is what worked best, not what “had” to exist.
cm: I’m not calling you stupid. I don’t expect everyone to know this stuff, but you’d think the Isaac Newton of Information Theory would be a little more circumspect about saying idiotic things.
You don’t need the nucleus to do much of anything, at least for a short time. Amost all the metabolic activity, the enzymes and stockpiles of spare parts and machinery for synthesis and destruction are all out there, ready to go.
It’s like if somebody arrested all the top executives for Walmart, blew up their headquarters, and destroyed all their computers, everything would be fine for days or even longer at your local Walmart. All the stuff is on the shelves, clerks would still take your money, there might even be new stuff coming in by truck. However, the central organizer is gone, new orders wouldn’t be filled, and eventually the last of deliveries would come…and then it would slowly (not suddenly) fall apart.
It’s the same with the cell. The cytoplasm is the actual “store”, where business is transacted and work is done. The nucleus is the headquarters, or reservoir of new information and organization.
You’re thinking of mitchondrial DNA. Which is not mRNA.
Right, sorry. Not really up on my taxonomy if RNA types. lol
PZ, you might want to be careful about opportunities for quote mining. You don’t even need ellipses and brackets to turn this one into a call for the violent overthrow of capitalism:
–PZ Myers
Of course, you could forward that to David Horowitz, if you’re really that eager to make it into his blacklist. I think that’s more up his alley than criticisms of creationists.
The cytoplasm is the actual “store”, where business is transacted and work is done. This is in fact why most viruses work. They inject themselves into the “factory”, which then replicates them. Its likely that at some point some combination of a primitive replicator, energy producers and a virus got together and due to compatible genetics, instead of the later bursting the cell open, the “code” for the virus, for the energy producers and to duplicate the replication system got mixed together. Suddenly you have a cell that when it divides can produce its “own” energy producers and replication system, with a stable virus core directing it all.
And thus, PZ moves from godless liberal to godless commie. ;)
“If you remove the nucleus, which does all the heavy, ‘This is going to be a blah,’ part, it doesn’t make the cell stop working.”
Dembski & Co. cannot seem to stop imposing their top-down model of development in order to conclude top-down development. It isn’t even an argument, just an assumption that assumes the conclusion, and a conclusion that concludes the assumption, each being pointed out as “corroboration” of the other in this circular argument. I thought of mitochondria, too, but Dembski even uses these little buggers to prove design. He has argued that natural selection always selects for simplicity because it sometimes does so. He misquotes both Lynn Margulis and Brian Goodwin to deny symbiosis, and misuses Spiegelman’s experiments to show that one particularly simple pathway of the in vitro evolution of longer RNA sequences won’t work, and triumphantly points to that as if it means that no pathway would ever work.
My head is spinning. What pathways are there that he won’t either deny the possibility of or co-opt for his design argument?
Orgel’s Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.
Francis Crick
Perhaps we need a third rule:
Evolution is very much cleverer than Bill Dembski
Note that the material in question is clearly stated as coming from a colleague of Dembski’s, and Dembski clearly states that he’s not sure he buys it, but would like the members of the blog to consider it.
Why was it characterized on this blog as originating from Dembski, and that he is claiming that it constitutes a disproof of evolution? The most modest care in observing context before forming a critique seems to not have been exercised here.
Oh, please…how disingenuous can you get? Dembski willingly presented it without criticism. He doesn’t give a source, so he has to be held accountable for it.
You know, that explains an awful lot of my gym classmates…
It had to be said :D
I wouldn’t compare Dembski to Isaac Newton, really. Despite their common belief in a designer of natural laws, and employment of God-of-the-gaps arguments, Dembski doesn’t seem to have either the insight or the intelligence of Isaac Newton. I think he’s closer to a Fig Newton.
Or maybe a breakfast cereal. Something flaky…
Actually, IDers like Dembski pretty much abuse real information Theory: Information increases until it reaches the maximum limit of the medium (white noise).
Or at least that’s how I read it.
I have to agree with Dr. William Debski, the NEWTON of Information theory, that the oocyte is obviously front-loaded to take into account novel human technological developments, just as Dr. Pangloss was correct in asserting that the nose is OBVIOUSLY front-loaded to receive spctacles. It’s all so clear that your Darwinian propaganda has afflicted you with BLINDNESS that you cannot see the SPECTACLES on the Intelligently Designed NOSE on your face. I weep for your ignorance. O brave new world, that has such FOOLS in it!!!!
(disclaimer: To all that fail in grasping satire and irony, bite me)
He seems to think that the ability of transplanted nuclei to transform cells must have been specifically conferred upon our cells by his mythical Designer, for a specific purpose. What would that be?
I hate to get into technical details here, but since we already have the little trucks and buses and the little conductors and the traffic stops and so forth, maybe the Designer could make them into little tiny sub-cellular engineers. After all, somebody has to run all them tiny little choo choo trains.
It would seem that this statement is being overlooked here. “The ‘headless’ (no nucleus, no genome, etc.) egg cell proceeds to break down/destroy the non-nucleic parts of the somatic cell. It then ‘gets ahold of’ the somatic nucleus. It then proceeds to ‘reprogram’ the nucleus to express the appropriate genes for embryonic life.”
The language is quite clear. The ‘headless’ egg cell ‘reprograms’ the nucleus. It is not stated that the nucleus ‘reprograms’ the egg cell. It would seem that the ‘headless’ egg cell is in charge here.
Relative to the question of “how does the ovum do this without a nucleus”, perhaps your answer was premature.
Testytestaccio,
The ovum is able to “reprogram” the nucleus because that’s what it is ready to do. This controversy seems to be based on a basic misunderstanding of cellular biology, wherein new RNAs and proteins are required to do anything. The nucleus is required primarily for three things; first, to maintain the proper regulation of cellular levels of stuff by producing the proper amounts of RNAs to counteract degradation, second, to respond to changes in the environment by making new RNAs, and third, to pass on genetic information to heirs. To continue PZ’s Wal-Mart analogy, the ovum is ready to co-opt a strange nucleus and prepare it for development–that’s business as usual. It can continue doing this job for a while without a front office. Now, if we ask the ovum to respond to an environmental stress without a nucleus, then it will have a serious problem, much like if Wal-Mart were to receive a class-action lawsuit or undergo a rapid unionization while missing a front office. But if we just ask it to keep on doing what it was doing for a little while, it can do a pretty good job of that.
Ian H Spedding: I’ve said the same thing about fundamentalists in general being part of a good argument for positive atheism.
Nuclei aren’t needed for a cell to live, at least in the short term. That’s how red blood cells function, and they last for weeks.
Most of a cell’s machinery would continue to function properly for quite some time after a nuclear loss.
Several commentors seem to have made the false assumption that Dembski wrote the linked post himself. His apparent acceptance of the argument does suggest he is not clear on basic biology (I think we all know that), but it is also possible he is merely fishing for a counter argument.
Possible, but from where I stand, not very likely. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sensing the usual disingenuity(is that even a word?) from him.
Why would a designer design a system to deal with a situation that should never arise in the natural course of events? On the other hand, “successful evolvers” must come from a lineage that is highly tolerant of changes in its internal workings. Much of the work done with gene knock-outs also confirms this view–very often, the effects of genetically deleting a single system, even one that experiments have shown to play a crucial role in normal organisms, turns out to be surprisingly minor. Indeed, it is now generally accepted that simple gene knock-outs are a poor guide to function, and research is shifting to favor inducible knock-outs, in which a system can be deleted suddenly, without giving the organism time to compensate.
Gary Hurd:
With Dembski, it’s possible he wrote it himself, will be caught red-handed, and will then dismiss any objections by saying it was more “street theater.”
However, I think that PZ should have made Dembski’s attribution (to anonymous somebody who is not Dembski) more explicit, but I agree with the statement (posted I think to PT) that “I’m not sure I agree with the entire argument” is a moderately strong endorsement. Dembski allows it’s quite possible he accepts the argument down to its details, and states with certainty that he agrees with parts of it.
Funny, I would think the exact opposite as Dembski’s position. It is *designed* objects that fail miserably when asked to perform beyond their design parameters. (Using a car as a boat?)
Nature has to be very adaptable since things are so *messy*.
And is the point of this that Dembski is saying that things were *designed* to allow for cloning, that this is a sign from God that cloning is OK?