How does Complexity demonstrate Design

The word Life?Can it write it's -self?
All the materials that make a pen are found dissolved in the sea.
Do you see them being washed upon the shores of our world- pens?
Do they find paper and and begin writing meaning full words?What about F16 fighter jets? Will you find them washed up amoung the sea shells? Believe evolution and they have indeed in the past, for a living cell is as, no sorry- far more complex than this manmade killing machine.The science of mathematical probability, puts the probability of a mechanism as complex as a single living cell, forming without full intelligent control- passed the 26th power, the limit of the realm of probability. Indeed, 10 to the power of a trillion are the odds of evolution!Are you a betting man?
Evolution ain't no Sea Biscuit.Still more, evolution says the nuts and bolts created the machine, failing twice, in intelligent reasoning- for the origin of the nut and bolt.

Life -- you too have forgotten the fundamental difference between pens, F16's and living things. Pens don't fu*k!You haven't any clue as to how to correctly calculate any such probabiilities and you haven't considered that important little fact about living things as contrasted to pens and F16s.

Here's how to win any Lotto.First pick a number between 0 and 9. If it's not the right number, pick another until you get the right one.Next pick a number between 0 and 9. If it's not the second digit, pick another until you get the right one.Repeat until you have all the numbers.Want to know how to win all the lotteries?Buy all the tickets.That's how Evolution works. It can't lose.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

This is taken from Jonathan Sarfatis - DNA: marvelous messages or mostly mess?

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Such a system must be fully in place before it could work at all, a property called irreducible complexity. This means that it is impossible to be built by natural selection working on small changes.

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The ‘letters’ of DNA have another vital property due to their structure, which allows information to be transmitted: A pairs only with T, and C only with G, due to the chemical structures of the basesthe pair is like a rung or step on a spiral staircase. This means that the two strands of the double helix can be separated, and new strands can be formed that copy the information exactly. The new strand carries the same information as the old one, but instead of being like a photocopy, it is in a sense like a photographic negative. The copying is far more precise than pure chemistry could manageonly about 1 mistake in 10 billion copyings, because there is editing (proof-reading and error-checking) machinery, again encoded in the DNA. But how would the information for editing machinery be transmitted accurately before the machinery was in place? Lest it be argued that the accuracy could be achieved stepwise through selection, note that a high degree of accuracy is needed to prevent ‘error catastrophe’the accumulation of ‘noise’ in the form of junk proteins. Again there is a vicious circle (more irreducible complexity).

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Also, even the choice of the letters A, T, G and C now seems to be based on minimizing error. Evolutionists usually suppose that these letters happened to be the ones in the alleged primordial soup, but research shows that C (cytosine) is extremely unlikely to have been present in any such ‘soup.’ Rather, Dnall Mac Dnaill of Trinity College Dublin suggests that the letter choice is like the advanced error-checking systems that are incorporated into ISBNs on books, credit card numbers, bank accounts and airline tickets. Any alternatives would suffer error catastrophe.

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The circle of life-

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-All living things have encyclopedic information content, a recipe for all their complex machinery and structures.

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-This is stored and transmitted to the next generation as a message on DNA ‘letters,’ but the message is in the arrangement, not the letters themselves.

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-The message requires decoding and transmission machinery, which itself is part of the stored ‘message.’

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-The choices of the code and even the letters are optimal.

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-Therefore, the genetic coding system is an example of irreducible complexity.

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Cut & Paste Almeyda, cut & paste.So far just more unsupported assertions.Can you explain first why you think something as simple as DNA is complex?And second, why such complexity, if it exists, is a indication of design?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

This is bullpoop. What the author of that phrase did was assumed that all life suddenly appeared as it is completely identical to the one we see today. In other words, he took a snapshot of a fairly complex mechanism and completely ignore what came before.Here is an example. Suppose you take a look at today's fighter jet, which is very very complex. The author would claim that the fighter jet is so advance that it is impossible for it to be built through small changes. He completely ignores all the planes that came before, including the one the Wright brothers built and flew. After all, that first plane was completely alien compared to today's fighter jet.This message has been edited by Lam, 06-23-2004 11:59 PM

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The Laminator

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DarkStar writes:

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The point I was trying to make was that if a scientist looks at anothers work and claims that his conclusions were erroneous, his argument lacks legitimacy if all he did was examine the finished work rather than attempt to repeat the work to see if his results were the same.

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Scientists are well within their rights to criticize each other's work on the basis of methodology alone. In the case of Pasteur, for example, his research was conducted according to textbook methodological naturalism: proposing detectable, verifiable mechanisms for natural phenomena and testing his proposals under controlled lab conditions.In the case of intelligent-design creationist Michael Behe, his assertions are based on questionable philosophical constructs as well as intelligent-design inferences that dismiss a host of responsible naturalistic research out of hand. Behe's own lab work doesn't have any bearing on the assertions themselves (that is, he never claimed to have laboratory evidence supporting his hypothesis), so there's nothing else to criticize except his faulty methodology.regards,
Esteban Hambre

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Such a system must be fully in place before it could work at all, a property called irreducible complexity. This means that it is impossible to be built by natural selection working on small changes.

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Even Behe admits that indirect evolutionary pathways and multiple mutations that are not initially put under selective pressure can ultimately create irreducible complexity. Of course, he hand waves away these pathways by claiming that they are improbable without showing how to arrive at that conclusion, or even worse using faulty logic in order to ingore possible falsifications. The argument for IC rests on Behe's personal incredulity and nothing else.

It's been pointed out that intelligent design creationists seem to make Irreducible Complexity mean at least two different things.Originally, Behe said that IC referred to a functioning system comprising interconnected parts, the removal of one of which would cause the system to cease functioning. Note that this definition says nothing about its origin or development. However, this is quite different than what the IC concept has come to mean. Now ID creationists use IC to refer to a system that can't conceivably be created in step-by-step (i.e. Darwinian) fashion.I'm not sure why one should necessarily lead to the other. I've always considered the human heart to be irreducibly complex, in the sense that if the pump or any of the valves are not there, the system does not work. Nevertheless, we have plenty of examples of simpler circulatory systems in nature that could conceivably represent precursor systems to the complex human heart. Behe himself handwaves these sorts of arguments away, alleging that conceptual precursors (even if they exist elsewhere in Nature) aren't good enough.This is my problem with Irreducible Complexity's curious double-life: the IDC folks are allowed to use an existing system's attributes to make blanket statements about how it could not have originated, but the rest of us aren't allowed to use similar existing systems to speculate on possible developmental pathways.regards,
Esteban Hambre

Almeyda - quoting someone else making unsupported assertions is not evidence. Firstly, it is completely incorrect to state a single copy error rate. Different organisms have different proofreading and editing machinery, and therefore different error rates - even individual humans can have vastly different replicative error rates.Secondly, environment plays a huge part in error accumulation. This is why people who smoke get lung cancer - they are causing errors in their DNA sequence, leading to tumor formation. But the same is true of many other enviromental insults, not just chemical, but including things like heat and sunlight. The truth is, there is no need for proofreading for replication of DNA, so there is no reason to believe that "the first cell" had proofreading mechanisms.Additionally, that very lack of proofreading would have allowed evolution to take place much faster, because the error rate was higher, leading to more mutations...Also, some proofreading capability comes in the form of an additional domain on an existing protein that replicates DNA, so there is no reason to belief that it wasn't a modification by selection.The claim that potential 'error catastrophes' would prevent evolution is absurd - surely they occurred and killed off many individual life forms. But he's attacking mutation in general - as if he's arguing that no mutations occur at all...Which even you know is not true...

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The copying is far more precise than pure chemistry could manageonly about 1 mistake in 10 billion copyings, because there is editing (proof-reading and error-checking) machinery, again encoded in the DNA. But how would the information for editing machinery be transmitted accurately before the machinery was in place? Lest it be argued that the accuracy could be achieved stepwise through selection, note that a high degree of accuracy is needed to prevent ‘error catastrophe’the accumulation of ‘noise’ in the form of junk proteins. Again there is a vicious circle (more irreducible complexity).

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Nah. The way we do this in programming is a technique called "error trapping". Whenever there is an exchange of signals, you set up 'buckets' to catch an input that is erroneous. Signals can be erroneous in a multitude of ways, so sometimes you set up multiple buckets to do different things. One of the things you can do with multiple buckets is set up an logical cisruits that only allow a Write operation when you know the input is legit.Now I'm sure you're looking at thius and thinking that its all Design, but in fact we are building this precisely because there will be no intellect to make the decision when it needs to be made; we are getting the machine to ask and answer the question itself. We are removing the need for an Overseer to guard the purity of the data.And this is why despite the fact that computers make millions upon millions of decisions, BY AND LARGE, automatically, the intended data gets written and preserved. All automatically, all as a result of the laws of the universe as expressed through electronic circuits.

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Also, even the choice of the letters A, T, G and C now seems to be based on minimizing error... Rather, Dnall Mac Dnaill of Trinity College Dublin suggests that the letter choice is like the advanced error-checking systems that are incorporated into ISBNs on books, credit card numbers, bank accounts and airline tickets.

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Exactly. Thats what you would expect; that would be a required feature of a system that does what this system does.

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-Therefore, the genetic coding system is an example of irreducible complexity.

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Except, it clearly is not - else we would not have been able to derive it from first principles threough our investigation of the way data behaves.

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This is my problem with Irreducible Complexity's curious double-life: the IDC folks are allowed to use an existing system's attributes to make blanket statements about how it could not have originated, but the rest of us aren't allowed to use similar existing systems to speculate on possible developmental pathways.

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Agree with you completely. In a separate thread I used the development of the middle ear ossicles in fossil mammals as an example of building IC systems step by step. Not only that, but it required the changing of another IC systems, the reptillian lower jaw. What I was told by ID proponents is that the system is to "gross" to shed light on micro-scale cellular systems. However, a pathway is a pathway and I failed to see how cellular systems could not follow the same pathways and gross morphology. I have yet to understand this equivocation, especially since Behe often uses larger objects (eg mousetrap, eye) to illustrate his points.My other objection is the burden of proof that IDer's only seem to require of evolutionists. Behe claims that such systems as the BacFlag could only have come about in "one fell swoop", or in very few steps. He then requires evolutionists to show a step by step progression of how the system could have come about, and he wants the real pathways, not proposed or possible pathways. However, when asked for evidence of the "one fell swoop" leading to the BacFlag he relies on the inference from design and feels it isn't necessary to show actual evidence of this saltation-like mechanism.ID through IC is full of hypocrisy. It is not that evolution is limited to creating simple structures. Instead, it seems that evolution is limited by Behe's imagination and uneven use of required evidence.

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BREATHE DEEP THE GATHERING GLOOM

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BREATHE DEEP THE GATHERING GLOOM

Since it is clear that this is an utterly useless way to make any progress at all we need to recognize that some interpretations (out of all those that don't violate fundamental laws) are more likely to be useful, productive or valid than others.How would you suggest selecting those that are more likely to be useful and meaningful?