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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous].[/quote]

OK this is absurd.  Why don't you strip out your hatred of Richard Dawkins and say in your own words what you think the problem is with evolution / natural selection?  This is a mess.[/quote]

PP, I love Richard Dawkins like a brother.  Please tell me what was "absurd," and what was a "mess," and we can talk about it.[/quote]

For starters, you are criticizing the writings of Dawkins and then making general conclusions about all "naturalists".  Dawkins is neither our pope nor our priest.  It is crazy to hang a critique of all of naturalism on a word choice he made in a book.  It would be easier if you separate the two.  But even so, you are misconstruing his statement.  He has written enough on the subject for you to know that.

Second, you ask the question "what if all the evidence shows life could not arise from purely naturalistic causes?"  But nothing you point out actually contradicts evolutionary theory, even though that is what your above question demands for an answer.  You merely point out that it does not have an answer for everything yet.  And for that matter, you make categorical statements that evolutionary theory has no explanations for various unspecified functions within living cells, but in fact it has hypotheses on how many of these things occurred.

Third, you make this poetic statement about cells surpassing Darwin's imagination, as though that is proof of something.  Darwin's contribution to science was not cell biology.  It was evolution through natural selection.  He did not need to understand the inner workings of the cell to make good observations about how organisms evolve any more than Gregor Mendel needed to understand the structure of the genome to describe how inheritance worked, or for you to understand modern physics in order to predict what will happen when you throw a ball in the air.

Fourth, regarding the weasel program.  You clearly misunderstand the point about the target.  In real life, the target is not a "sequence".  The target is "fitness to reproduce".  A bad mutation makes an organism less likely to make it to maturity, to find a mate, and to reproduce.  A good mutation increases the odds.  That is (drumroll please) natural selection.  Nature selects the fittest examples.   If this was not obvious by reading the book, it is plainly stated on the wikipedia page entitled "weasel program".  Your lock analogy only describes the first part of the experiment, but not the second.

As for the statement about the program being "misleading", did you really think that a day-long desktop programming exercise about weasels with typewriters would fully capture the details of evolution?  He is admitting that the goal in nature is not long term like in the weasel program, but short term.  However, that does not invalidate the exercise.  And surely you know that natural selection, in addition to being studied in nature, has been simulated on a computer before.

So then to conclude, you accuse someone (Dawkins? all naturalists) of permeating the discussions with logical fallacies.  But really, short of that one accusation you made against Dawkins for his choice of the word "must", what logical fallacies are you talking about?[/quote]

See now, if they taught evolution in the public schools, PP here could've been having a nice relaxing bubble-bath instead of pulling other-PPs head out of their ass.

Thanks, PP, for your stalwart efforts here.[/quote]

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