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From: Ernest Major <{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: To sum up
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:03:55 +0000
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On 18/02/2025 06:03, MarkE wrote:
> On 18/02/2025 4:06 am, Ernest Major wrote:
>> On 17/02/2025 11:05, MarkE wrote:
>>> On 15/02/2025 10:06 pm, jillery wrote:
>>>> On Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:59:53 +1100, MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 15/02/2025 1:53 pm, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>>>> On 2/8/25 5:06 AM, MarkE wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> My argument is therefore, as complexity goes up, the challenges to
>>>>>>> naturalistic OOL and evolution also increase.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Evolution produces complexity without the least concern. Design 
>>>>>> tries to
>>>>>> minimize it and create simplicity. As complexity goes up, the 
>>>>>> challenge
>>>>>> to designed OOL also increases.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> My assertion is self-evident, is it not? I.e.:
>>>>>
>>>>> OOL: the more complex the first self-replicating entity needs to 
>>>>> be, the
>>>>> greater the challenge to its prebiotic (i.e. pre-Darwinian evolution)
>>>>> formation.
>>>>>
>>>>> Evolution: the more complex a "higher" organism, given a maximum
>>>>> plausible rate of mutation, fixation and time, the greater the 
>>>>> challenge
>>>>> to its evolution.
>>>>>
>>>>> On the other hand, your assertion that "evolution produces complexity
>>>>> without the least concern" is not self-evident, and is neither an
>>>>> argument nor a rebuttal. The capability of evolution to produce
>>>>> complexity is, rather, a fundamental contention.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Here's an opportunity for you to actually speak to me, instead of your
>>>> usual petty sniping.  I understand your arguments stated above.
>>>>
>>>> WRT OOL: It's unknown what the complexity of a self-replicating entity
>>>> "needs to be". Any estimates about this are based on *assumptions*
>>>> about the mechanism(s) which could create the first self-replicating
>>>> entity, and the environment(s) which could support those mechanism(s).
>>>> This makes your claim a GotG argument.
>>>>
>>>> WRT OOL and Evolution: The fatal flaw with both of your arguments is
>>>> they conflate complexity with functionality.  The one does not inform
>>>> the other.  The actual challenge to evolution is to create better
>>>> functionality for a given environment.
>>>>
>>>> Pro Ployd's concurrent post WRT altitude hypoxia illustrates the
>>>> difference.  Most humans respond to extreme altitude by increasing
>>>> their hematocrit.  This is a simple but at best temporary solution,
>>>> with long-term and fatal complications. A simpler and better solution
>>>> most mountain human populations did is to change their hemoglobin to
>>>> increase its oxygen saturation.  Of course, this requires time for
>>>> natural selection to select for this trait, and some individuals will
>>>> likely die without it.
>>>>
>>>> Once again, your obsession with complexity serves you poorly.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Agreed, care is needed in defining complexity and its relationship to 
>>> function.
>>>
>>> The challenge to evolution is the creation of functional complexity. 
>>> Here is a description of the ultimate manifestation of functional 
>>> complexity:
>>>
>>> 'The human brain contains some 100 billion neurons, which together 
>>> form a network of Internet-like complexity. Christof Koch, chief 
>>> scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, calls 
>>> the brain "the most complex object in the known universe," and he's 
>>> mapping its connections in hopes of discovering the origins of 
>>> consciousness.'
>>> http://www.npr.org/2013/06/14/191614360/decoding-the-most-complex- 
>>> object-in-the-universe
>>
>> A problem with irreducible complexity as an argument for design (apart 
>> from being achievable by natural processes) is the lack of an 
>> objective criterion for delimiting systems, parts and functions. 
>> Something maybe both irreducibly complex or not irreducibly complex 
>> depending on the choices made for the preceding. Similarly there is an 
>> issue with the lack of an objective criterion for dividing the 
>> universe into disjoint objects. The human brain is part of the human 
>> body; either the human is more complex that the human brain, or the 
>> rest of the human body has negative complexity, or complexity is an 
>> intensive rather than an extensive property.
>>
> 
> More precisely, if an alleged case of irreducible complexity is 
> achievable by natural processes, it's not irreducible.

That redefinition makes the argument from irreducible complexity 
worthless (rather than just false). It boils down to a claim that if a 
system can't have evolved if it can have evolved. The whole point of the 
original argument from irreducible complexity was that it purportedly 
had an objective criterion for identifying systems that couldn't have 
evolved. (I'm willing to believe that Behe was sincere in thinking that 
he had such a criterion, though Peter Nyikos did dent my confidence in 
that opinion.) That argument was false (the axiom that irreducibly 
complex systems can't evolve is not true - we grant provisionally grant 
a particular choice of system, part and function and show that there are 
mechanisms for such systems to evolve), but swapping it for a fallacious 
(circular) argument is not an improvement.
> 
>> Another issue is defining a measure of complexity. If complexity is an 
>> extensive property why is the elephant brain, with 3 times the number 
>> of neurons, a more complex object than the human brain. (You could try 
>> appealing to the size of the connectome, where there is a convenient 
>> gap in our knowledge of the size of connectomes. I don't find it 
>> especially plausible that human neurons have on average 3 times the 
>> number of synapses as elephant neurons, but my intuition might be 
>> wrong on this point.) If complexity is an intensive property then 
>> might not corvid and psittacid brains have a higher complexity than 
>> human brains; the achieve a surprising degree of intelligence with 
>> much smaller brains.
> 
> Agree that complexity, including "functional complexity", is difficult 
> to both define and quantify.
> 
If you want to make an argument that evolution can't achieve something 
you either need some hard objective criterion (irreducible complexity 
was a failed attempt at that) or numbers for the capability of evolution 
to produce "complexity" and the "complexity" of the systems under 
consideration. Without either of these all you have in an argument from 
incredulity.

You look at the complexity of cells and organisms and say "ooh its so 
complex; it must be designed". I look at the Heath-Robinson 
(Rube-Goldberg) nature of cells and organism and say "no way is that 
designed". We need a means of choosing between those two responses. The 
theory of evolution explains the observations; the hypothesis (being 
generous) of intelligent design explains away the observations. To my 
way of thinking that makes the evolution the superior explanation.
>>
>>>
>>> 'According to physicist Roger Penrose, what’s in our head is orders 
>>> of magnitude more complex than anything one sees in the Universe: "If 
>>> you look at the entire physical cosmos," says Penrose, "our brains 
>>> are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they're the most perfectly organized 
>>> part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an 
>>> inert lump."'
>>>
>>> 'Each cubic millimeter of tissue in the neocortex, reports Michael 
>>> Chorost in World Wide Mind, contains between 860 million and 1.3 
>>> billion synapses. Estimates of the total number of synapses in the 
>>> neocortex range from 164 trillion to 200 trillion. The total number 
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