AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:Devolution is the handing down of power from one level to a lower level I always thought...
Yes, devolution is a political term to my ears too. Scotland is devolving from England, for example. It makes no sense to use it in biology.
And, blobby, your second statement shows you do not understand irreducible complexity-basically, in the most simple terms (since this is coming from a simple man)-irreducible complexity says that machines that suffer from that malady could not have been put together piece by piece through evolution...
Oh I see. I thought irreducible complexity was a biological term. It seems I had overestimated it - the statement that many machines did not evolve is rather obvious. Of course their design may have evolved - or at least become refined through a design process - but a given, physical machine itself has not evolved.
because natural selection is only able (assuming it works in the first place) to keep working and beneficial machines and qualities in existence..but the machines must exist in their entirety for them to work!
Again the statement that machines are not products of biological natural selection is rather obvious. And I disagree that natural selection has anything to do with machines at all - I don't see why you are saying the ecological process of natural selection keeps machines, which are products of man, working.
Also not all machines must be in their entirety to work. My car lost a hub-cap the other day and still runs fine. If irreducible complexity says "those parts of the machine that are essential to it's operation cannot be removed or it won't work" it seems like circular reasoning to me. It's a statement so obvious that it is redundant: "the essential parts are essential".
What you are saying is that because a machine is aging and losing its abilities... (assuming also that that is the case with the human eye) you can somehow get it evolving naturally from that finding
Well that's is not what I said at all. Firstly I was talking about eyes, not machines, and secondly I was disagreeing that eyes have become worse over the generations. I disagree with your assumption and so am not pretending it proves anything.
If I show you that my car can run as one system falls apart after the other, it doesn't mean my car could have evolved from sheets of metal and frayed wires on a sandy beach (personal experience on the car by the way).
I agree now that I was wrong to suggest the author's strange notion of "devolution" counters irreducible complexity. You have explained why clearly, thank you.
But at the same time we were discussing human beings. Using the word machine seems to make unwarranted assumptions, as though you are plugging your conclusion - the need for an engineer - into your premise.
That seems erroneous to me because all human beings were once a single cell and they grow. I'm not like a machine in the literal sense of the word, such as a radio, where the bits are made separately then put together. It's not like my parents took some ears and some bones and some teeth and so on and stuck them together in the manner of Dr. Frankenstein.
I agree that living things seem like machines in many ways but, like all analogies, if one takes the likeness literally, it just doesn't add up.
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) would claim that I, Blob, an adult human being, am irreducibly complex, or that at least certain organs of mine are irreducibly compex. Yet I was once a zygote - a single cell. So me and all of my organs have "come into existance gradually".
