Intelligent Design

I look at the drawing of the flagellum, and I certainly think it looks like a car manual. So, if I were shown that drawing on its own, I might comment on its 'design features'.But this is not the real thing. It is a diagrammatic representation of the shapes involved, and it uses typical human designer illustration techniques. Of course it looks designed. If we look at an 'original' we are likely to see it much more as a set of animals (cells) living in symbiosis.

KingPenguin -If you want to examine how organisms start then you need the 'Origin of Life' section. That will cover the inorganic-organic transfer.'Evolutionary pressure' is not wand-waving, but a shorthand for the fundamental proposal of the Theory of Evolution. Briefly, this states that if you have a population which reproduces itself, and that population has random minor variations which also get reproduced, over time any variations which confers a net benefit will become more common in the population, since the individuals with it will tend to breed better.If you then place this breeding population in a particular environment, the individuals which live in particular niches will take up those variations which fit them for those niches, and you get Species. As the environment changes, those species either vary to fit it or die off, leaving a niche for some other life-form to adopt.It's easier just to say 'evolutionary pressure'.[This message has been edited by Me, 08-20-2002]

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Originally posted by mark24:

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Originally posted by halcyonwaters:

A snow-flake isn't complex at all -- it is repetitive.

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Ocean: Complex and Random.
SaltCrystal/Snow-Flake: Not Complex and Not Random
Life: Complex and Non-Random

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David

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Bad example. Let me try another tack.

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I thought the original example was 'Snowfall', not 'a snowflake'. Snowfall makes me think much more about the Ocean, which you have agreed to be complex.By now I am not sure what you are arguing about - the point seems both complex and random. The nub of the intelligent design argument is that some things seem so complex and directed (non-random?) that they must have a designer. I would have thought that we could address this point by taking such an item - the eye is a favourite - and showing how evolutionary pressures operating blindly could produce the item. This is now a common answer to the ID argument.It is inappropriate to require a move back to inorganic matter - that belongs in the Origin of Life thread, but the object should certainly move from simple to complex organisation. It is understood that evolution can work just as well the other way round, but the point of the argument involves simple to complex. We have both seen simulation experiments in which objects such as an eye are created from simple beginnings and evolutionary rulesets.Incidentally, objects can be both simple and complex at the same time, depending on the way you are looking at them. A lump of rock can be simple when seen, complex when examined at the crystal level, and very complex when examined at the atomic level. As for wood...!