Andyjones Replies

Andyjones has responded to my post on failing to educate him about science. His response is: Failure to Educate? Failure to Persuade. I'm reposting his entire response ....

Larry Moran replied to my latest post with an admission of failure. He thinks he has failed to educate, but I think rather he is confusing the word ‘persuade’ with the word ‘educate’.

He thinks I am rationalising junk DNA with a pile of ‘what-ifs’. But the fact is that most of my ‘what-ifs’ are already known to have some basis in reality. I am not denying any obvious reality. Indeed, the basic machinery of life looks like design, far more than when Paley was around. Yes, there could also be a great deal of junk. That’s why I have said a number of times that ID is not committed to the idea that there is no junk.

Yet, from my point of view, I see a whole pile of Darwinian/post-Darwinian materialists who have only partly explored the genome, working from an assumption that the genome was not designed, and thus are jumping the gun on the evidence. For example, Larry still seems to think that pseudogenes are of themselves ‘solid evidence’ of broken genes despite the fact that we know that at least some pseudogenes influence the rate of translation of real genes by competing with them; a simple design reason why there should be ‘false genes’ = pseudogenes. Who has explored the rest of them?

From his emotive response to my perfectly valid, albeit speculative suggestions (though they were not plucked out of the air either), I don’t trust this guy to think clearly and calmly about the possibility of design. That’s the real problem.

This is all very frustrating. Why do IDiots who have no serious training in biochemistry and molecular biology think they know more than the experts?

And why do they refuse to learn when we attempt to educate them?

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Posted in: Evolutionary Biology, Genome, Rationalism v Superstition