What exactly is ID?

Thank you. I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you're saying here. What "something else"? What is ID categorized under now, if not religion? It is according to the Wedge Document I linked, written by the people who thought up ID and who are now it's main advocates .

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I hunt for the truthI am the one Orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand
My image is of agony, my servants rape the land
Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name
Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law
My name is called religion, sadistic, sacred whore.
-Lyrics by Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead

This is news to me. The alignment of planets happened on May 5th, year 2,000, I believe. Nothing happened! You win! Are you happy now?

Hi everyone!I am not resuming participation in this thread. Since my name came up, I'm responding to Iblis with some more up to date information. I've have since read voluminously about the Dover trial, and have just completed yet another book on the topic, one I received for Christmas titled The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America by Lauri Lebo.All this reading makes one thing very apparent: there can be no question that Buckingham and Bonsell lied during their depositions and on the stand.I continue to believe that creationism's greatest contribution to science lies in the field of psychology. Despite the evidence that they lied, as did other board members to lesser extents, none believe that they lied or did anything wrong.The lies in Dover committed by board members were of an unbelievable magnitude.First, all creationist members of the board lied when they denied discussing creationism at board meetings and mentioning it in their public comments. They committed these lies both in their depositions and on the stand at trial. The decision to deny was made at the Thomas Moore Law Center (the board's law firm) the day before these board members were deposed by the plaintiff's lawyers. Compounding their misdeeds, board members then falsely accused the local news media of lying in their stories reporting the creationist and religious comments, stories that were filed and printed over a period of many months, and that were never questioned at the time. Conveniently, recordings of the board meetings were destroyed, but some direct evidence did turn up on video tape from a local TV station, for example, of Buckingham advocating for creationism.Second, Buckingham, the most visible advocate for creationism and ID on the board, lied on numerous occasions about many things. The board's defense team decided to give up defending Buckingham and simply cited his OxyContin addiction to explain his behavior. But whatever the reason, Buckingham lied when he denied advocating creationism, he lied when he denied promoting religion (he famously remarked on one occasion while advocating for creationism, "Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross, isn't someone going to take a stand for him?"), and he lied about the source of the money for the book Of Pandas and People that was anonymously donated to the school (he took up a collection at his church, deposited the money in his bank account, wrote a check to Donald Bonsell (Alan Bonsell's father) with the notation "Pandas and People" on it, then gave the check to Alan Bonsell to give to his father).Third, Alan Bonsell lied when he denied knowing where the money for the book Of Pandas and People came from. As described above, Buckingham gave Bonsell the check, and Bonsell gave the check to his father. Bonsell's father then purchased the books and donated them anonymously to the school.The federal district court where the trial was held investigated whether to pursue charges of perjury but decided against.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Spelling.

Your point is nonsense, ID is in fact creationism, as has been demonstrated to you over and over again.Your claim that astrology is incompatible with Christianity is easily demonstrated to be false by making reference to Daniel chapter 7, in which he uses it to produce what is very commonly believed to be Biblical prophecy. First he examines the western sky above the point where the sun set to establish omens about what is falling and declining in the world. He makes note of the appearance of Leo, Ursa Major, and Leo Minor, identifying them with the prior empires of history.Then he looks east to see what is rising and, as appropriate for the season when Leo is setting after the sun, he doesn't see anything for a while. Pisces is a fairly insubstantial member of the Zodiac. Finally what rises under Pisces is visible, which is Cetus, the whale, commonly represented in mythological planispheres from that day to this as a great beast having several heads and horns. Using this as his platform he preaches the destiny of the Greek empire, which will crush and break up all the others but eventually be defeated by God's Chosen People.St. John the Divine does something similar in Revelations 12 and 13, but because it is live material rather than an example already compromised by excessive use in instruction, if you want me to explain it to you you will have to pay cash up front. And when I'm done explaining it, you will find you have changed a lot of your opinions, without really understanding quite how that happened. But, you will be a better person ...Just to cap this one off, what did you think that business about the Star of Bethlehem was?

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I didn't claim that anything existed. I pointed out that YOU didn't have the evidence to back up YOUR claim.

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My claim is that the enzyme lost it's functiona fter it was been mutated for long enough. What's wrong about that?

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Humans make things out of the 50 proteins used in the E Coli flagellum (or variants within 20% difference) ?

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No. Humans make bidirectional rotary motor-driven propellers.

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I got back today and I have just done so. There is a list of 8 terms and their definitions at the bottom of p144. Exactly what I said was needed. I can only suppose that your copy is defective, with a blank page 144, otherwise you could have found it by simply glancing to the left.

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My job was to give you the definition of specification. Which resides on page 152. The chapter is named "Specification Defined". Now why in teh world would you tell me that my definition is not complete because I did not mention something that is written on the page 144 an in a completely different chapter?

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I've already advised you not to bother because the calculation is irrelevant anyway. And it certainly isn't my job to help you, by doing your work for you.

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Why is it irrelevant?

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I've already done all that, and your only response is to demand that I do the work for you. Well it's not my problem if your calculations are mistaken and useless. It only undermines your case.

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That's because I gave you my calcualtion. And you said it's wrong. Fine, now you give me the right calculation.

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That is not even meaningful. Since you need to consider them all to produce a SINGLE valid complexity figure using the only valid specification you have offered (instead of the fabrication you actually tried to use) there is no question of them fitting or not fitting "the complexity".
Let me repeat again: the complexity is the probability of an event matching the specification without design, considering all possible explanations.

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And the event in this question is the E. COli bacterial flagellum. Not some other one.

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If you read TDI you would find out that you are completely wrong, as I have already explained. There is nothing wrong with deriving the original pattern from the event (as indeed you have done) so long as it can be reasonably derived without reference to the event (TRACT). And a simple geometric structure, such as a face-centred cubic lattice obviously can be derived without reference to the event.

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And now you have to describe the event by using that pattern. And that is what you can not do. Becasue all salt crystals are different. Where all E. Coli flagella are the same.

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You are wrong, as usual. All high probability events are classified as being due to regularities. Just check TDI.

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Regularity equals natural law. The mechanism of growth is itself in question of being designed, so you can't claim it's a regularity.

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You're wrong about the definition of regularity and the rest of your argument is a confused mess, too. It's really very simple. If you don't want to consider the origins of the growth mechanisms then you just have to accept that they exist. If you want to say that THEY are designed then you need to apply Dembski's method to them. (And what if they are not ?)

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By this definition everythin g can be explained by regularity. Is there something that can not be explained that way?

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Then you're stuck with the flagellum being a high probability event, and therefore attributed to regularity.

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Than everything is a regularity! By your logic we couldn't just pick one object and calculate it's CSI, because we would have to explain the object that brought this one into being. etc. et.c ad infinitum. Therefore, your argument is flawed. You pick one object and calculate his CSI and that's that.

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The immediate origin is the growth mechanisms. Any account more basic than that will be an account of those mechanisms.

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But we are not interested in that. The growth mechanisms do not create the information needed to build the flagellum. Something else made that information. And we are trying to calculate only that information.

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Well it IS odd as an example of a beneficial mutation because it can't ever be fixed in a population. And no, I don't think that you can't find a few other examples nor did I suggest that it would be impossible. What I pointed out is that examples are not definitions.

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Really? If you ctually read the article than you would know that it's a wide spread mutation across Northern Europe.

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In this case, I know the results of theory and observation.

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If that were true, than you would have agreed with me a long time ago.

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In the first case, sickle-cell is atypical, and in the second place, I should like to know why you do not consider not dying of malaria to be amongst the functions of the gene.

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No, it's very common that beenficial mutations act like that. The resistane to HIV acts in the same way.And as I pointed out earlier. If you break your HDD and claim that now it's resistant to viruses, and you equate that with a HDD's real functions, and say it's a gain in function, than your reasoning is flawed.Obviously it's not a gain in functions. HDD's function, among others is tor ead data from magnetic plates, reads it with a laser, sends that data to the MBO etc. Beying deformed and losing some of that is not a gain in function. It's a loss in function. Being not able to work properly is not a gain in anything. Regardless of your HDD not being able to be infected by viruses, or human not being able to get infested by malaria.Now if you made a little machanism in the HDD that checked for viruses and removed them upon downloading them from the internet. Now that would be a gain in new function. In the same way, if a human gained a new molecular machine to remove the malaria upon entering the cells, that would also be a new function.

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This does not answer my question. Why are you using Sanford's language of "genetic entropy" if your argument, when and if you think of one, would not be the same as his?

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But it is the same as his.

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No, you've just said what unit of measurement you want to use.

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What else do you want?

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I can see why you'd want to duck this issue. Not only would providing a way of measuring the information in a DNA sequence take work, but once you produced it it would become trivial to prove you wrong.

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If you're going to take refuge in obscurity, might I suggest that with less effort and less embarrassment to yourself, you could take refuge in silence?

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Like I didn't expalin enough times how the specification coupled with complexity work. I even shown links for that many time. Go look them up if you're interested.

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The problem is you are referring to genes which apply to disease resistance. The diseases in question rely on the target cells to be functioning normally, so by necessity any resistance mechanism is going to affect normal function.

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Well that is what mutations do. Where is the problem in that?

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However, I read of an example recently posted by PZ myers in his blog on the evolution of alpha-actinin which anchors the actin cytoskeleton of cells. To describe it briefly, invertebrates have one of these genes whereas vertebrates have four. These extra genes resulted from a duplication event 200-300 million years ago. In that time these duplicated genes have undergone mutations, adapting to subtly different roles, in particular alpha-actinin 2 and 3 which are expressed almost exclusively in skeletal muscle tissue. So how does this fit into your hypothetical genetic entropy?

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This fits nicely in philosophy, not observational science. We have no evidence for what is claimed there? Is there any evidence this happened 200-300 million years ago? Is there any evidence that it happened from a duplication event? Is there any evidence that a duplicated genes can take on new functions? Where has something like that been observed?

Then you were wrong. It can. But that doesn't make astrology a scientific theory.Behe was trying to redefine the notion of a scientific theory so that it meant any concept that scientists can think about investigating.The point of the question he was asked during the trial was that by that definition, astrology would also be a "scientific theory", as he was forced to admit. Which means that even if he was allowed to redefine this concept to suit his whims, then for something to be a "scientific theory" by his redefinition would not justify teaching it in schools.

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How? You are claiming that an unknowable designer of unmeasurable power used undetectable mechanisms for purposes you can not explain.

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You claimed that I claimed tha the designer is infinitely powerful. Obviously I ddin't say that.

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No, because we follow a naturalistic approach citing only what exists.

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You, however, ARE claiming that there is an invisible pink unicorn. Your only "evidence" is that you think he did it.

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No. My evidence is in every single human being that exists. It's intelligence.

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WRONG! Science absolutely has an absolute. "Reality is real".

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No, it hasn't. Nothing is absolute in science. Science assumes reality to be true in the first place. But it can not prove it to be true. What is reality? Can you point me to reality? No you can't, nobody can. Because we can't even prove that matter exists. Which science only assumes to be real in order to work.

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You have thrown out that premise and thus everything you've presented has NOT been science.

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No, I just dont' agree with your philosophy.

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Seriously? Look around you. Are you honestly suggesting that the presence of multicellular lifeforms IN ADDITION TO single celled life forms means that the grand sum of complexity has DECREASED?

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Decreased from WHEN? From the time before life existed? Well obviously, no, from that point till the point life was designed, complexity went up. But after that, genetic entropy started pushing it down again. You do know that most of species that ever lived are extinct, right?

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I didn't bother reading your link because I can tell you EVEN WITHOUT READING IT that the experiment was NOT an attempt to turn RNA strands into people.

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It was an attempt to show how evolution made first RNA chanis into more complex polymers and how these could have evolved into something more complex. The experiment failed badly.

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In fact, there were ALREADY people present when THEY started the experiment.

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LOL, the point is?

You are still pushing the religious belief in a "fall" from designed perfection in the guise of "genetic entropy." Are you going to tell us that this occurred about 6,000 years ago next? Because that is the only way you could be making the kinds of claims you have been making. So?Perhaps it was evolution and natural selection that was responsible for this, not some mythical and religiously-based "genetic entropy."And what about the species that, after 3.5 billion or so years, are still doing just fine in spite of this "genetic entropy" idea?How many billions of years do we have to wait for this genetic Malthusian doom? Or should we say this genetic Armageddon?It doesn't sound like much of a problem if the Earth is going to be swallowed by an expanding sun before the genetics entropy us out, eh?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Okay then, what are the limits to his power? What could he have created and what can't he have created? Now, we are getting somewhere. OKay, so you think that the "designer" is a human. Do you have a name? Is he someone I know? So, now you are a Young Earth Creationist claiming that ALL planets and animals which ever existed were alive and well in the Garden of Eden and everything has gone downhill since. I'm going to do an experiment and throw a cardboard box out the window to see if people can create flying machines. BRB.Nope. Didn't work. So, since I did ONE experiment in which I failed to make a machine that can fly, therefore no machine in the past present or future has been capable of flight.THAT'S your argument above. Since these scientists running THIS ONE experiment failed to achieve what they set out to, it must be IMPOSSIBLE for it to have ever happened.

If familiarity with theory and observation in biology made people agree with creationist nonsense, then the scientific community would agree with it instead of regarding creationists as blithering nincompoops.Here, for example, is a statement released by the Genetics Society of America. Now, I think that they know something more than you do about the theory, practice, and observations of genetic science. I said that it was atypical, not unique; and I should still like to know why you consider not dying not to constitute a biological function. I guess that's why I said no such thing. But it is clearly not --- he is talking about a reduction of fitness leading to extinction of the species. The method.If you announced that you were going to weigh Mars, and I asked how, and you replied: "In kilograms", I should find your answer equally shifty and evasive. Give me the method. We need to be able to feed in a DNA sequence and get out an answer in bits. If you can't do that, then you can't make your argument meaningful, let alone correct.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

In the first place Dembski's expert witness report in Kitzmiller v. Dover said that the people now using the term ID do so as a result of Thaxton's use of the term.In the second place, Fred Hoyle's arguments are amongst the standard nonsense used by creationists. Apparently no-one can tell the difference between an argument for ID and an argument for creationism.Hoyle, for example, is the origin of that well-worn creationist nonsense about mutations not increasing "information". Whereas Buckingham, arguing for the inclusion of an intelligent design textbook in the Dover curriculum, famously said: "Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross, isn't someone going to take a stand for him?"Here's a challenge for you. Can you come up with an argument for ID that is not a creationist argument? If there was anything irrational about the two statements you quoted, please let me know.

Now we're getting down to it.The modern ID movement, begun after the Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court decision, was seen as a way to get creation "science" back into the schools under a new pretext. In other words, it started out as a lie, or at the very least, as an attempted deception. (Reading the Wedge strategy -->Wedge strategy shows that it is both.)What we have seen since has done little to alter this perception. ID by its very nature cannot come to a conclusion contrary to a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture. Why should it? That would be contrary to its very purpose for existence.And this was all confirmed in the Dover decision, when both sides presented their evidence and opinions in a federal district court, under oath. The court's decision was clear: ID is simply creationism or creation "science" with the serial numbers filed off in an attempt to fool the unwary.The sparse "science" trotted forth to support ID is, coincidentally, brought forth by creationists who happen also be scientists (the very few fellow travelers who don't fit this description can safely be ignored). And so far, none of that "science" has passed the tests of science. Behe's attempted defense of ID on the witness stand at Dover was classic creation "science" -- all creation and no science. As the star witness supporting creationism he was mightily embarrassed by the cross examination, and was a significant factor in the court's finding that ID is creationism in disguise.So, to answer the OP's question, "What exactly is ID?" we can safely conclude that ID is creationism trying once again to masquerade as science, and once again being rejected for the creationism that it really is.The large number of related threads and posts on this very website have done nothing to counter this conclusion.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

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My claim is that the enzyme lost it's functiona fter it was been mutated for long enough. What's wrong about that?

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What's wrong about it is that it isn't the claim we were talking about. What we are talking about is your assertion that the mutated enzymes did not have any function.

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No. Humans make bidirectional rotary motor-driven propellers.

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Then all this business about 50 proteins and limits on mutation are completely irrelevant. They've got nothing to do with the specification.

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My job was to give you the definition of specification. Which resides on page 152. The chapter is named "Specification Defined". Now why in teh world would you tell me that my definition is not complete because I did not mention something that is written on the page 144 an in a completely different chapter?

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p144 is in the SAME chapter. (Chapter 5 - titled Specification). And yes, it does contain information without which your definition is not complete. Indeed you should have known that the definitions of the terms were missing and that your definition was incomplete without me even having to tell you.

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Why is it irrelevant?

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Because it uses a fabrication instead of a valid specification. Of course I've told you this often enough that you know it already.

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That's because I gave you my calcualtion. And you said it's wrong. Fine, now you give me the right calculation.

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No, you didn't give me your calculation, just the result. I've demonstrated why your calculation is wrong with a simple example. I've told you how to do it correctly. If you can't be bothered then that's not my problem.

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And the event in this question is the E. COli bacterial flagellum. Not some other one.

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Of course it is the specification that matters, not the event.

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And now you have to describe the event by using that pattern. And that is what you can not do. Becasue all salt crystals are different. Where all E. Coli flagella are the same.

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Of course, I have alreeady refuted this objection.However, please show me how you derive the complete description of the E Coli flagellum from your specification "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller".

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Regularity equals natural law. The mechanism of growth is itself in question of being designed, so you can't claim it's a regularity.

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No, in this context regularity does not equal natural law. All high probability events are assigned to regularity according to the Explanatory Filter. The growth of the flagellum is a high probability event and the immediate cause is those mechanisms. There is no rule excluding mechanisms that "might be designed" from the list of possible explanations. All you can do about them is look to see if they are designed - which you don't want to do.

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By this definition everythin g can be explained by regularity. Is there something that can not be explained that way?

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Really ? You're saying that Dembski's method CAN'T work because whatever specification you choose the probability will always come out high ?

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By your logic we couldn't just pick one object and calculate it's CSI, because we would have to explain the object that brought this one into being. etc. et.c ad infinitum. Therefore, your argument is flawed. You pick one object and calculate his CSI and that's that.

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So what you are saying is that Dembski's logic is wrong, because ALL design is implemented through intermediate processes. It's an odd point of view. Certainly there are human designers who work directly with materials, or who employ craftsmen to hand-build objects.

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But we are not interested in that. The growth mechanisms do not create the information needed to build the flagellum. Something else made that information. And we are trying to calculate only that information.

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Which means that you have to deal with the growth mechanisms rather than the flagellum itself.Oh, let's be honest. What you are trying to do is to stick with the only calculation you've got, even though it's completely wrong.

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Really? If you ctually read the article than you would know that it's a wide spread mutation across Northern Europe.

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Sickle-cell is mainly found in Africa, not Europe. And, as I have said, the frequency is maintained by selection at a level well short of fixation.