10 Categories of Evidence For ID

Proposed for the Intelligent Design Forum.In this thread I would like to address an assertion often raised by ID detractors to the effect of: ID has no evidence to support it.I know I promised to also discuss methodologies to detect design and I will. But first, let's just concentrate on the one topic as this post is already way too long.ID has several areas of evidence that directly supports the overall concept. Here are five and 5 more will follow in a subsequent post.1) Function found in nature. Function is an attribute assigned by intelligence to cause something to cause 'something else' to do something. I design a hammer and cause it to do something else: drive a nail. My body causes my brain to function and the brain then causes me to think (sometimes). My car is a designed mechanism that allows me to drive it to get something else from point A to point B (could be my body, mail or groceries).In fact, just looking up the word at dictionary.com and considering the first two definitions we can see the intelligence inherent in the word function: 1) The action for which a person or thing is particularly fitted or employed. 2) Assigned duty or activity.FACT: We see much function in nature. This is evidence that intelligence operated to design and assign function in order that in each case, one something (often quite different) causes something else.2) The fossil record. Many IDists believe that species were designed very similar to the way they are today. Some evolution may have slightly affected their morphology of course, but when we look at the fossil record we would predict to see species coming into it fully formed, not evidence that species gradually evolved into their macroscopic forms as Darwin proposed.FACT: This is exactly what we see in the fossil record. There is no gradual evolution of bauplanes, but long periods of nothing interspersed with relatively sudden explosions of fully formed organisms. These organisms then stay this way until they go extinct in the record. This is direct evidence for intelligent design.3) DNA found only in organisms. The DNA found in the cellular genome contains more information than in all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. ID predicts that DNA, a major building block of complex organisms, can only be created by an intelligent agent or by code preprogrammed by an intelligent agent. Furthermore, some of the building blocks for these nucleic acids are very unstable in nature. For example, Miller found that ribose, which is essential for both DNA and RNA, has a half life (t) of only 44 years at pH 7.0 (neutral) and 0 C. It’s even worse at high temperatures t = 73 minutes at pH 7.0 and 100 C (the latter evidence is given for the benefit of heat-vent enthusiasts). This is no time at all when we view life as having formed over billions of years.FACT: DNA must be designed.4) Mathematical calculations and evidence as in the form of the study I introduced in the Intelligent Design in Universities thread showing that nature has a tendency to disorganize: As loose information is diffused, information entropy will tend to increase unless energy, guided by intelligence, is added into the system to stabilize it.FACT: This shows the human genome to be DEVOLVING not EVOLVING. This is what ID predicts. Darwinism predicts the exact opposite tendency. This devolving tendency in vertebrate genomes is direct evidence for intelligent design.5) Existence of irreducibly complex systems in nature. ICSs are interesting little critters as they consist of several well matched parts that perform a function and all work together to cause an overall system function. These are well conceived systems that must be planned before they are designed in that Part A--Does job A--Part B, Does job B--Part C, Does job C--Part D, does job D; and the result is that all of these jobs work together to cause an overall function in the system as a whole.FACT: ICSs must be designed and the reality they are found everywhere in nature is evidence for intelligent design.Let's hold 'er here for now. Thank you AdminBen! I accidentally deleted the other 5 from my laptop, so I'll rewrite those as the thread progresses.This message has been edited by Jerry Don Bauer, 05-11-2005 06:35 AM

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Design Dynamics

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First of all, I owe you an apology. We didn't get off on the right footing and that's partly my own fault. I should not have adopted the tone I have when I responded to you in previous encounters. I apologize for my behaviour.

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Having said that, and promising that I will behave, is there a chance you'll talk to me if I engage you in this thread? All in good spirit and without hostility?

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YES! Welcome, Parasomnium.

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Design Dynamics

I'll get to Parasomnium's post later as, it's long, he/she is out for the day and I have a study to peruse first.

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1) Function. Whilst this been addressed above quite well, another thought came to me. You spoke of hammers having the function of driving a nail. Why would we want to drive a nail? To build something. So what is our function?

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You mean what is the function of the person? If you want to just look at that, I would think in the nail driving process the person functions to swing the hammer.

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2) The fossil record shows very little but a seeming progress (an evolution if you will) of life over a long period of time. There is no evidence that the life was designed by an intelligence. What would we expect to see if the creatures were designed by intelligence? I do not think the question can be answered.

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Well, I don't know where you get this, Gould, Eldredge and many other well known evolutionists honestly admit there is no evidence in the fossil record to support gradual evolution:"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"-Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, in letter to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979. Cited in: Sunderland, Luther D., Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems (El Cajon, CA: Master Books, 1988), p. 89.MY NOTE ON THE ABOVE: It's a sad era in science when there are scientists who chose to DELIBERATELY mislead their readers. That's just the way it is today and it has spread like a cancer throughout academia.

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3) Your evidence shows that extraordinary circumstances must have been in place for life to have been created. This is already an accepted fact.

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If extraordinary circumstances would have had to have been in place to accept naturalism and there is no evidence they were, why then, are you a naturalist? (Assuming you are). This is the very reason I became an ID theorist. That seems to be where the evidence points.

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4)Evolution was word that Darwin was loathe to use because it implied progression...which he was very much against proposing. Evolutionary theory does not propose that creatures will evolve, just change, how can we know what creature is more 'progressed' than any other creature. The most succesfull lifeforms are the simplest. However, as Schneider's Ev program clearly shows, loose information, guided by a selection routine will increase the information content. No need for an intelligent agent.

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The computer scientist ID theorists have ripped those programs apart. Computer programs will do whatever we program them to do. They show nothing that can be mirrored in the real world. And you don't think Darwin was an evolutionist:"I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale [1]."

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5) Irreducible Complexity is not an issue. As has been shown time and time again, ICS can evolve.

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Then they must be hiding those studies very well because those who study this can't seem to find them. Who showed this? When?

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In conclusion, you have succesfully shown that life has been designed. You have yet to demonstrate how it was designed intelligently. Evolutionary theory proposes a mechanism for both the design and the creation of new creatures, and uses the same evidence.

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There are no scientific mechanisms in Darwinism at all. I hope you have not been convinced there are. And, there is not one shred of evidence that can be shown experimentally or is capable of the falsification inherent in the scientific method to be validly considered science anywhere in Darwinism, I'm afraid.

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I'm fascinated by the field of ID, but I've only ever seen the 'D' part really discussed. Now, about this 'I' component...how to detect intelligence? That's the golden egg for IDists. Several thousand years later and we aren't massively closer to an answer. Evolutionary theory is less than two centuries old.

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You misunderstand how the term intelligence is used in ID. It is not an attribute we need discover in systems. It is just a term to distinguish the type of design. If you see a picturesque scape of sand dunes, they may appear to be designed and in a way they are, by natural processes that could have gone one of many ways. But in the case of the architect of a shopping center, the plan is well thought out and detailed blueprints are first drawn up. That is ID, it just distinguishes intelligence from the natural.[1] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York: Atheneum, 1972), p. 184.

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Design Dynamics

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DNA is found in organisms...but it is not found in all organisms i.e. many viruses are RNA viruses. Prions can transmit information without any nucleic acid component at all.

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Then there is no DNA to consider and the point is moot. IOW, who cares?

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The genome has a grand total of about 1.5% genes. The rest is a combination of pseudogenes, junk DNA, endogenous retroviruses, and other retroelements. Thus, much of the information is either junk or does not contribute to the phenotype of the organism (which also indicates pretty lousy design but fits very well with evolutionary theory where just being better at reproducing gets you through..not great design).

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I'm having a great deal of trouble following your logic here. What does any of this have to do with DNA being designed or not?

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ID cannot predict that DNA is intelligently designed as ID has not proposed a testable and falsifiable hypothesis which would allow one to make predictions. All ID does is pre-supposes a designer.

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This is not science, just your opinion. I'm an IDist and predicted that DNA must be designed in the OP, who's to say then that ID has not predicted this?

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Although unstable as building blocks, DNA can persist in fossils for thousands of years and RNA has been obtained from flu patient remains from the early 1900's.
Science. 1997 Mar 21;275(5307):1793-6. Related Articles, Links

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Again. This has nothing to do with whether DNA is designed. In those flu patients, it WAS designed by preprogrammed code.

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Conclusion: You have not demonstrated that DNA must be designed.

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Your conclusion is a non sequitur, I'm afraid, because it is based on no premises. In fact, you never offered a single premise to show DNA as not designed--all of your examples were examples of DESIGNED DNA--therefore you cannot draw any logical conclusions to the contrary.

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Design Dynamics

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You have frequently errored in equating genes and genomes. Secondly, the genome is a mess only paralleled by the random noise in the transcriptome. This accumulation of junk DNA and retroelements that do not have an effect on phenotype is hardly indicative of a well thought out planned design but are nice evidence of random muation and evolution. In addition, for some of these elements, they have been shown within the human population to still be actively increaseing or decreasing the size of the genome randomly by transposition...this can be observed directly and unless you consider every act of sexual reproduction careful genome design, it hardly demostrates intelligent design. In summary, most of the genome has nothing to do with morphology or function and is just there by mutation and drift (which has been direcly observed) in non-selected sequences...hardly a compelling case for design...where is that direct observation of intelligence in population genetics that you were just about to show me

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Well, I don't think I misunderstand genomes, I know they are a mess with tons of noise in there. An IDist would fully expect to find this as a direct result of evolution. This has little to say about the original design. Everything in nature degrades eventually even the universe as a whole until it will die it's heat death. I think you would agree that genomic noise is probably a result of evolution? Then we have no argument on this.

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Unfortunately for you and all IDists this is not my opinion..it is exactly the problem with ID in the first place. In any actual field of science, every hypothesis is testable and falsifiable. No IDist has ever proposed a testable and falsifiable hypothesis of ID. Thus, you cannot make predictions that make any sense. I could replace disigned in your sentence above with "made by a sentient tube of toothpaste" and it would not change it or make it valid. You guys are no different from creationists who claim "goddidit" but replace it with "intelligencedidit"..wow, what a breakthrough

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I agree. Every hypothesis proposed must be testable and falsifiable. Of course, you cannot name me one tenet unique to Darwinism that this applies to, but I'll ignore this for now because by now you've figured out what a nice guy I am.So what tenets of ID do you not think testable and falsifiable? I'm certainly familiar with none. DNA simply does not form from less complex molecules in nature. How is that not testable? We cannot even make it in the lab. We can manage some simple RNA, but not DNA. And this is falsifiable, simply show an example of DNA forming outside an organism and propose a model where this could be done in nature. That's science, not religion. I know you don't want to accept this, but it's a fact.

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This had to do with the stability of RNA and DNA which you implied was relatively poor. try getting rid of DNA contamination in a lab..that is DNA floating around in the air...it is very stable and a pain in the butt to get rid of. In any case, your claim is nonsense. The flu's origin can be traced and lo and behold, the flu virus came from related strains of flu that mutated...not poof bang designed and implanted independently in the 20 million people who died during the 1918 flu epidemic. Your claim amounts to your saying so in the face of the evidence..not providing evidence. What is the evidence that the RNA genome of the 1918 flu was designed?

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Well gee, Mammuthus. I wasn't exactly talking about the DNA from a danged bug splattered across your windshield. I know that we can find pieces of a dead skunk floating down the Arkansas River. But skunks designed that DNA from preprogrammed code most happily donated (I assume) by the mama and papa skunk.And..... right. The mutated flu strain came from another strain it did not drop out of a rock, now did it? Are we talking past one another here?

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You should be a comedian...at least this type of statement is enough to make me laugh. Now you want me to prove a negative? Thank you.

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Well good. This tells me you are enjoying our conversation. We'll see if you still are down the road,

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You have now demonstrated that ID is creationism i.e. invoking the supernatural to explain (without any effect) natural phenomenon. You claimed to have positive evidence that DNA was designed. Not a single one of your assertions is supported by fact. Now you attack me for not showing that DNA is not designed?

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You KNOW it is designed. You will not admit that DNA is designed from pre-programmed code? I'm talking bios logos here. It's you that keeps wanting to throw gods, gremlins and fairies in here hoping (I guess) to persuade someone that DNA can just pop out of a bloody stalagmite???

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I'll tell you what, before you even try to provide evidence for ID, why not tell us what the testable and falsifiable hypothesis of ID is in the first place?

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Nah...Let's stay on topic for now. I will get to that.

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I see a mutation passed on from parent to offspring and map it to a specific base change in a specific gene and show that it changes a specific protein such that it fails to bind a second protein efficiently. Show me how in such a case you would test for this occurrence being an intelligent design decision? How would you falsify that intelligence was involved?

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I would test for it exactly as you do. There is no such thing as an ID biology. But yet you cannot see that the nucleic acids and resulting translated proteins were designed by preprogrammed code. Tell me, do you also believe that Windows XP can just poof out of a goat's butt?

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Scientists know broadly but not in all details how DNA replicates, how it is transmitted from one generation to the next, how the it mutates, with what frequency DNA and RNA polymerases incorporate errors, how resultant mutations spread among families, within species and among them. From this data alone, not counting other independent lines of inquiry, the parsimonious conclusion is random mutation and natural selection for some sequences and random mutation and drift for others. This can be demonstrated in the lab in multiple organisms from viruses to primates. All hypothesis of genetics, genomics, evolution can be tested and falsified. How does saying, "an intelligence did it" in any way add to the information that we have? Where is the intelligence in DNA replication. How would you falsify that any intelligence was involved?

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I never stated intelligence causes mutations. You are putting words into my mouth and attempting to take my argument much further than I initially framed it.

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Until you can do test and falsify ID, it is merely a religious belief and has no place in science.

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Really? Tell me how you would falsify chemistry.

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Design Dynamics

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If we're designed by an intelligence, what is our function? As an addition is gravity a function? Since that causes planets to cause other planets to do something. Is gravity assigned by intelligence. Can you actually demonstrate that function is assigned by intelligence?

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I think you misunderstood me. Just because I stated that function is designed by intelligence doesn't necessarily extrapolate to, 'then all things created by intelligence has a function.'And no, gravity and orbiting planets don't have any function that I could define. They are just there or they are not.What kind of demonstration would you want?

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I didn't say there was evidence of gradualism in the fossil record. What I said was that the fossil record shows that life has changed throughout time. I erroneously used the word progress, which was my bad. Let me reiterate for clarity

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The fossil record shows very little but a seeming change of lifeforms that have existed on earth over a long period of time. That is not evidence that the life was designed by an intelligence. What would we expect to see in the fossil record if the creatures were designed by intelligence? I do not think the question can be answered.

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How does the fact that life has changed over time demonstrate intelligence?

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I didn't say that the fossil record demonstrates intelligence, it is just one of the five evidences I listed that work together to support the overall design concept. What I stated was that if organisms did not evolve and are designed fully formed, this is what we would expect to see in the record and this is exactly what we do see. It is just another piece of supporting evidence in the big picture.

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We both agree that extraordinary circumstances surround the origin of life. I believe it was an environment that we no longer see around us today that we have not accurately modelled yet. There is evidence that the environment on earth was dramatically different when life originated than it is now. Now, where is your evidence that the extraordinary circumstances was not a unique and unknown environment but instead some unknown guiding hand?

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No. I don't think we DO agree on this. Your notion of it requires extraordinary circumstances. Mine just requires science and if we choose to view it as a guiding hand then some are glad to calculate and model that guiding hand for you. Can you do this with abiogenesis?

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They have failed with Schneider's Ev program. The program does two things. First is random information generation (loose information), the second is a selection method. If you take away the selection method the information content tends towards 0. When you add the selection method it increases. Thus, loose information coupled with a selection method increases information content. Agree or disagree? The only genuine issue I've seen is that of the selection method used. Which is kind of irrelevant. However, the source code is freely available and Schneider has invited IDists/Creationists to develop new selection methods that show the program to fail. So far they have failed to do so.

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Disagree. Royal Truman, Salvador Cordova and other IDists have taken Schneider's and Adami's work apart.What they are doing is choosing to "select" what they want to keep, and reject what they do not. This was also the basis of Dawkin's weasel deally. Think about it:Flipping 500 quarters and having them all come up heads is statistically impossible. But if I flip them, then intelligently select to keep all the heads and flip only the tails, it won't be long until I have all heads. Information grows.This is what the programs are doing and do you know what everyone but Darwinists call this? Intelligent design.

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That's right, looks like descent with modification he is proposing there. Did I see the word 'evolution' used here? No. Evolution comes from 'evolutio' which means unfolding. It implies the end is already known. That is why Darwin didn't use the word (actually in the end he gave up and started using it because everyone else was). As Darwin himself said:
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After long reflection, I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists

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[Charles Darwin, December 4 1872. Letter to the American paleontologist Alpheus Hyatt.]

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So you are just going to openly admit here that there is no such thing as a theory of evolution? Are you sure you want me to accept this?

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I'm sure you are well aware, having studied it. One example is Schneider's Ev program. Another is tackled in the radio example above. In fact plenty of examples are discussed in many threads here. The underlying problem with IC is that it presupposes that the function of an ICS has to have remained the same throughout its existence, which is not true.

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No, we do not propose it has remained the same for all time. It could have been much more complex at one time. No one has ever proposed a credible way that the flagellum in E. Coli could have evolved I'll get into Ken Miller's work when I address the first post.

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I am not here to defend evolutionism. It has been tackled plenty of times elsewhere. Nothing has yet convinced me that it isn't science, I doubt you are going to change that, since I think better minds than you and I have been trying to demonstrate it as not being science for longer than you or I have been alive. However, I am willing to listen to what IDists have to say.

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I always learn from people and probably will from you. Thank you for listening.

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So we are agreed then that something can be designed by natural processes. We can establish that something has been designed, but how can we demonstrate how it was designed. In order to differentiate betwen intelligent design and natural design you need to establish the intelligent side of it over the natural side. A great way to demonstrate ID (but will probably never happen) is to actually see these blueprints the designer used to develop life.

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Sure we can agree that nature designs things, mountains, clouds, beautiful valleys with streams, etc. But nature has it's limits. Nature does not design Sony TVs, lawnmowers or people. Here is where we differ as the latter were intelligently designed.But we need not know HOW it was designed in order to conclude it was. I'm sitting here watching my pride and joy, the big screen in front of me, and I would have no earthly idea HOW it was designed as I know nothing about that kind of thing. Do I then conclude it evolved? I mean it's made of atoms just as are kidneys.And I'll let you see the blueprints for the initial design of an organism when you present those for abiogenesis. Neither will ever produce them because we weren't there. It's really rather silly for either side to go there.

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Design Dynamics

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This argument does not make sense. Some specific sequences are increasing in number, some are decreasing. In some organisms, repetitive DNA is for the most part, not tolerated...so are you then saying that bacteria and viruses are the only species evolving because their genomes are streamlined relative to other organisms? There is no evidence that organisms have degraded. In fact, the expansion of our species across the planet is indication of a higher relative fitness as compared to many other species...though again, bacteria have us beat.

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No, I'm not saying that bacteria and viruses are the only organisms evolving, they are just among them. But I'm afraid I presented a study in the university thread done by evolutionary biologists that clearly show the human genome devolving for the last 6 million years, in fact I calculated it right down to the increasing entropy for each generation. Sorry.

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This is a bit of a different argument. On the one hand you are saying you do not accept evolution but now you are talking about abiogenesis. Do you know what the difference between the two are?

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Now when did I say I don't accept evolution? That would be pretty silly since I am an evolutionist. I accept the science of evolution, it is the pseudo-science of Darwinism I reject. And yes, I think I learned the difference between evolution and abiogenesis in about the 10th grade.

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Nobody here is going to say we have much information on abiogenesis...but it is still a science as different conditions and scenarios can be tested for their ability to generate replicators i..e one can form a hypothesis about the conditions necessary for the formation of self replicating molecules and test them. Evolution only deals with life once it exists and has nothing to say on the matter of the first replicator. In any case, if the precursor of life was RNA, why would you look to form DNA spontaneously?

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Because we do not know that the precursor of life WAS RNA. We can surmise this, but we don't know it. All I said was that DNA is not formed outside an organism by nature. This DNA is formed by pre-programmed code, is it not? Then it was designed. Period. You cannot win this argument because I am right!

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which would you like? That related species should be more similar genetically than non-related species? This is tested all the time and could be falsified easily if say a worm was more similar genetically to humans than chimps are to humans.

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Well gee. That's not some unique tenet of Darwinism, that's just common sense. I think everyone knew a long time before Darwin that a Chimp would be closer genotypically to a Gorilla than it would an apple.

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So, every meiotic event requires design?

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No.

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I did not realize how intelligent an ameoba is when it divides and intelligently assorts each and every base pair after carefully thinking about it. Seriously, DNA synthesis is a simple chemical reaction..why does it require a designer much less an intelligent one every time conception occurs?

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Because it does not do so spontaneously, chemically speaking. That reaction is a non-spontaneous reaction that must be caused by something. In fact, it is caused by intellegent pre-programmed code in the long run. Do you disagree with this?

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Pre-programmed? I do not know that it is designed.

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Well if you think that complex code can just poof from the dust spontaneously, then you need to tell Bill Gates to fire all those programmers and just take a walk through the desert ever now and then. Reckon he would run across LongHorn?

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I don't assume some magic fairy suddenly created the DNA in my parents so that they could pass it on to me......

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Good. Because mean people would probably sneer at you.

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it was passed on in a chain since the last common ancestor of all replicators.

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Hmmm....This is only a tenet of your faith. Faith can be defined as the belief in something where there is no evidence to support it, and you have no evidence at all to base this conclusion on.

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Chemistry is a field not a hypothesis.

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Cool. So is ID.

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Pick any current hypothesis in chemistry and you will find it is testable and falsifiable.

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Even cooler; you will find this in ID as well.

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Intelligent design is the hypothesis that biodiversity can only be explained by an undefined intelligence.

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Nope. I'm afraid you didn't even get close with that. ID is not a hypothesis at all. It is an epistemology, I'm afraid.

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Design Dynamics

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You have defined 'function' as something that must come from intelligence. Show me that this is true, in whatever way you can.

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That's why I asked you to state what demonstration you might want. There is not one you can think of, is there?Yet, it's true I have defined it as having a link to intelligence because it is intelligence that must conceive it. Think of this series of functions: a motor turns a drive shaft which turns a wheel which gets me down the road. If we logically analyze this, what possible thing in nature could reason out this function and form it? Get down to the simplest function found in nature and it will always be the same logic. The concept of function is reason, not law.

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Ah right. So even if evolutionary theory was true, this would be evidence for ID? After all evolutionary theory also predicts that organisms in the fossil record would be fully formed. It also states that they will be in a certain order, and there would be two forms A and C where an organism B would appear between the two. Since ID doesn't do this, its evidence is far from compelling. It only explains what aspect of the fossil record, not all the other properties it has.

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However, I'll let you have this one as an extremely weak piece of evidence that needs significant support.

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Well, you can let me have it the hard way or the easy way, I guess, but either way it is true. I might also state here that you certainly view Darwinism differently than do others, but I suppose this is your right. Darwin himself stated:"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."You certainly do not seem to believe this, so I'll ask you: how the heck do you think the higher organisms formed if not by numerous, successive, slight modifications, over time?

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Are you saying that extraordinary circumstances cannot arise in nature according to the laws of science? That's a bold statement. Both of our scenarios may well require science. One requires that prebiotic earth was very different to the way it is now, the other requires a sentience above and beyond earth/space/time to guide evolution for some reason.

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Not any that could form a living organism. If there were do you not think someone on your side probably would have mentioned this by now? And nothing in my belief system requires evolution to be guided. I am not a theistic evolutionist.

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Excellent, I'd like to see this guiding hand modelled.

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Great. You can read this post and the one that follows it and tell me how many gods you find in the designer:http://EvC Forum: Foundations of ID

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You of course know that I cannot tell you how abiogenesis occurs. That is simply honesty, there is plenty of research going into it, and progress is being made. As yet, no insurmountable barrier has been found so we cannot discount it as a possibility. I am happy to accept that God/Bob/XGFT's VII from the Tr'EF! formation created life on earth. I simply refuse to close my mind to the possibility that it was a perfectly natural occurance requiring no sentience.

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I know you cannot tell me exactly how abiogenesis occurred. My point is that I hope you can see that similarly, I cannot give you an exact blueprint for design implementation. Conversely, I can certainly stay in science and get a lot closer than do my opponents. Read the above posts and I think you will see.

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I've read Truman's response. I don't constitute it as taking the program apart.

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I think he does.

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Yes, they choose what to keep and to reject. Nature also selects what to keep and reject

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Not using intelligence like those programs do, it doesn't. Natural selection is highly overplayed and could never be responsible for a billions of complex speciations. Never has anyone proposed a credible model how this could happen.

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Well, no it isn't impossible, just dramaticaly improbable.

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Actually, it's mathematically and scientifically impossible. Want to see the math?

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Right and if you flipped 500 coins and got 250 heads, and then copied that state randomly fliping 5 of the coins and you did that twice you might get:

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One collection with 245 heads
One collection with 255 heads

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Which would be totally within the realms of possibility. If both of these collections were subject to the same event we might see

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1 x 240 heads
2 x 250 heads
1 x 260 heads

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But this is intelligence! You aren't randomly doing anything. You are looking at an arrangement of coins, intelligently making a choice of which ones you want to keep and intelligently rejecting the ones you do not want. This could not be a clearer case of intelligent design.

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If having more heads is better for survival then the 260 heads entity is more likely to gain resources than the 240 head monster then we might expect it to reproduce more often, say twice as often. Very soon we start seeing the the number of heads in one of the piles increasing, and the 240 head branch becoming extinct.

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Ev is using an extreme form of selection. I have already established this, so you don't need to reiterate it. If you, or any one else, wishes to write an alogorithm for the program that matches natural selection more closely, then go ahead.

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However, we are agreed on the important issue, that loose information and a selection method can increase information. You just believe that the selection method has to have arisen from an intelligent agent and I maintain that it might have, but it could have arisen naturally. You haven't demonstrated the need for the intelligence yet.

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Yes I have agreed that intelligence can increase information. Please don't try to twist that any differently. Everything you've presented has been intelligence, you just want to call it something else.

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Design Dynamics

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Function does not necessarily imply intelligence.
In this study, the spontaneous evolution of a radio is described. The researchers used a simulated evolutionary process in which the fitness of an electronic circuit as an oscillator was selected for.

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The surprising thing was that one of the solutions emerging out of this trial was a radio circuit that picked up AM signals and used them as output for the oscillator function. This is an example of function evolving without intelligence prompting it.

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Ok. I read that paper but was not clear on how you are using it to bring an argument. Now I will read your post, examine each of your comments and add my input.

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Comment: this precludes the ID counterargument that the experimenters themselves are the intelligence behind the design. If they themselves don't know how the evolved circuits work, their intelligence cannot be responsible for the design, even if their intelligence is involved in setting up the experiment.

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Well, if I understand this, do note that they entered this experiment with a preset goal: "The motivation was to evolve an oscillator of a precise frequency without using capacitors." And note that they achieved that goal: "From 20 runs, 10 resulted in successful oscillation, attaining the target frequency within 1% and with minimum amplitude of 100 mV."Further note that there are all kinds of designed equipment in this experiment and as such this could represent nothing we would find in nature that I can grasp.

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In other words: an unexpected and unconventional way of producing an oscillating signal had been "invented" by a mindless process of evolution.

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How does anyone know this when you openly state above: "If they themselves don't know how the evolved circuits work, their intelligence cannot be responsible for the design..." And yet they conclude that the signal was "invented" by a mindless process of evolution? They could know this if they don't even understand it how it's working? There may be a perfectly good reason for this just not understood. In any case, no conclusions can be drawn at this point.

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Note: "The evolutionary process had utilised...", as if it were intelligent. But the evolutionary process is a mindless one. It just looks like it's intelligent. That's what I think is the core problem with ID: ID-ists interpret what they see in nature as the product of genuine intelligence, whereas we can see from this simulation that the process of evolution is capable of fooling us.

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Well, be careful here. I can pick up an AM signal with nothing more than a lemon and a copper penny. What does this show in nature? You are going to have to go light-years further than this to show anything at all. Electrical waves are not similar to genomes. Radio signals are not similar to evolving populations of organisms. If you are to show evolution with anything resembling a biological system, I would suggest we stay in biology. Have you guys simply given up doing this in biology and moving on?

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The definition of the word 'function' cannot be used as conclusive evidence, because there are also uses of 'function' that do not directly imply intelligence example

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This doesn't mean anything. We can look up anything in another dictionary, pick definition 3, 6 or 8 and come up with a different definition because words can have more than one meanings and most do.The fact is that I like the definitions I used because they better support my case. Here is a rehash of another post: Yet, it's true I have defined it as having a link to intelligence because it is intelligence that must conceive it. Think of this series of functions: a motor turns a drive shaft which turns a wheel which gets me down the road. If we logically analyze this, what possible thing in nature could reason out this function and form it? Get down to the simplest function found in nature and it will always be the same logic. The concept of function is reason, not law.

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In the last quote, the bold sentence exemplifies a use of the word 'function' that does not imply intelligence as a causative factor.

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Why sure. I could scheme a definition of any word that twists its meaning. But you cannot state that cold weather being a function of the terrain is anything close to the way I'm using the word. In fact, to me, it is not even proper English because cold weather does not function. It's either cold or hot and that's it.

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Stating it that way suggests that evolutionists propose there is a goal in evolution, and that along the path toward that goal, there exist unfinished organisms.

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That is not the case, it's a distortion of evolutionist ideas. Each individual organism is a complete, "fully formed" example of its species in its own point in time. Species do evolve, but not "into their macroscopic forms", Darwin never proposed that.
Evolution doesn't predict the a priori existence, for example, of an ideal horse that unfinished proto-horse species gradually morph into. Rather, it's the other way around: the modern horse happens to be one of the forms that proto-horse species have evolved into, but things could easily have gone in a different direction, and we might never have had the pleasure of riding these magnificent animals.

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I understand there is no goal in evolution. That was not my point. The fossil record is an accurate record of around 80% of the earth's biotic history. If creatures evolved the way Darwin suggested, do you really think there would be no evidence in the fossil record of one species evolving into another? Somewhere? Anywhere??

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How is that direct evidence for intelligent design? It is only direct evidence for the fact that, sometimes, new species seem to crop up in a relatively short span of time. How this happens cannot be deduced directly from the fossil record. It could easily be surmised that aliens arrive here every so often with a spaceship load of new animals they picked up somewhere and dump on earth. How would you determine which is to be preferred: ID or alien Noahs? In the absence of direct evidence for either theory, evolutionists discard both, unless and until such evidence is found.

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And if the aliens arrived, then the system is designed by aliens. Why do you think life on earth could not be seeded by aliens? You do know there is a branch of ID called panspermia consisting of such notables in science as Francis Crick and Fred Hoyle who actively preach this notion, don't you? You see, there are only so many options here. Either life was designed or it wasn't. There is no 'it was kind of designed' out there.If higher organisms (Eukaryotes) evolved, we would expect to see some evidence of this in the record. My brand of ID sees the most probable option of origins as design in forms close to what organisms are today. And we would expect to see this in the record if it were true and this is exactly what we see. Look no further than the Cambrian explosion.

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The scientific method now requires a test to find out if the prediction is borne out. What test does ID propose? This is an honest question that deserves an honest answer. In fact, many evolutionists think the answer is long overdue.

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You mean like it does with common descent? Anyhow, ID does not propose the tests, biology does and tests have been done:"When DNA is synthesized in the lab, the two strands are separated and new bases are added to the 3' end-thus DNA is assembled from the 5' to 3' end. DNA cannot be synthesized from scratch. A short piece of DNA, called a primer, is required for the reaction to begin. Primers are designed such that they are able to bind to the target DNA, the binding of which is the initiator for DNA synthesis."http://bioteach.ubc.ca/Bioinformatics/GenomeProjects/Well gee. Intelligent designers in the lab have tried to synthesize these complex molecules from scratch and have not succeeded. Surely we can weigh this fact, compare it with the fact that no one has ever seen it form in nature outside an organism and draw a hypothesis from this.This is science. people, not religion. Have I said this enough, yet?

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I am no molecular biologist, but I would surmise that it is possible that the binding of ribose to other large organic molecules alters the chemical properties of the constituent parts and might thus lend some form of 'protection' against denaturisation. Encapsulation of ribose in vesicles of lipids might provide a similar effect. But I think I'd better let the real molecular biologists deal with this one, I just gave it a shot.

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I'll take that the way it was intended and leave it alone.

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I will not repeat the evolutionist arguments from the thread you mentioned, but I would note that on the one hand you say that "energy, guided by intelligence, is added into the system to stabilize it", whereas on the other hand you say that the human genome devolves, i.e. isn't stable. Aren't these contradictory claims?

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And again: how is this direct evidence for intelligent design? How does the fact that things get worse over time directly say anything about how things got to be in the first place?

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I don't see how they are contradictory. And It is direct evidence for intelligent design because it supports a tenet of intelligent design: "loose" information will tend to degrade over time (become more disorganized) rather than evolve with complexity.Try this experiment sometimes, I have. Take a class of 5th graders. Write a three or four sentence poem on a piece of paper but don't show it to anyone. Whisper it to the first student, then have her pass it to the next student in a whisper, then when it reaches the last student, have him write what he heard on the board. Then write the original poem on the board.The information will likely have degraded to the point it is nonsensical to the original information.But add work into the system to stabilize it and see what happens. Have a student walk around the room with the original (the work) and correct each student (the intelligence) and this will stabilize this information.There is a concept in physics called Maxwell's Demon which translates the same concept into physical hypothesis. I'm just ratcheting it up a notch.

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In this article, by Ken Miller, irreducible complexity is shown to be a flawed concept. The paragon of IC, the flagellum, is seen to be reduced and still functioning:
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The most powerful rebuttals to the flagellum story, however, have not come from direct attempts to answer the critics of evolution. Rather, they have emerged from the steady progress of scientific work on the genes and proteins associated with the flagellum and other cellular structures. Such studies have now established that the entire premise by which this molecular machine has been advanced as an argument against evolution is wrong - the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex. As we will see, the flagellum - the supreme example of the power of this new "science of design" - has failed its most basic scientific test. Remember the claim that "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional?" As the evidence has shown, nature is filled with examples of "precursors" to the flagellum that are indeed "missing a part," and yet are fully-functional. Functional enough, in some cases, to pose a serious threat to human life.

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Yep. Poor Ken tried with that article but just didn't get it done. Uncle Bill refuted him pretty good here.I do agree with Miller that there are homologous proteins in the protein exporting system and the type 3 secretory system but that doesn't show anything. There are homologous bricks in buildings but that does not suggest that one building evolved into the other. We find homology with genes, organs and all kinds of other structures. But what conclusions can be drawn from this? None, I'm afraid.

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Then follows a technical explanation of what is said in the quote above.
Another example from the same article deals with that other icon of IC, the vertebrate blood clotting system. This is a cascade of protein reactions which is claimed by IC not to function when even one of the many factors is missing.
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[...]the claim that every one of the components must be present for clotting to work is central to the "evidence" for design. One of those components, as these quotations indicate, is Factor XII, which initiates the cascade. Once again, however, a nasty little fact gets in the way of intelligent design theory. Dolphins lack Factor XII (Robinson, Kasting, and Aggeler 1969), and yet their blood clots perfectly well. How can this be if the clotting cascade is indeed irreducibly complex? It cannot, of course, and therefore the claim of irreducible complexity is wrong for this system as well.

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Ahh...I messed up the quotes, but you'll figure it out. Perhaps that is not an IC system to begin with? Who said this:"any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional?"This is taught nowhere in ID. IDists often find that when detractors begin to take apart an IC system and find it still functioning, it was never an IC system to begin with as in the above system. (and they knew that to begin with *wink*wink*)The very definition is a system that cannot be reduced beyond certain core parts and still function. Is it still functioning? Then that was not an IC system. Now I will give you some examples of an IC system you will NOT reduce and the system still function. You need to only consider those.

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Design Dynamics

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It is understandable that IDists reject these programs, but the fact is that the modeling of natural processes via computer programs has a long history of success, from meteorology to particle physics to structural analysis to microchips and on and on. Evolution programs and genetic algorithm programs model the evolutionary process of descent with modification and natural selection, and they definitively show what is intuitively obvious anyway: information does not depend upon intelligence.

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Even the simplest of natural processes creates information. For example, the spectrum of light emitted by a star is encoded in its electromagnetic emissions. The star created this information. If we analyze and record the spectrum via spectroscopy all we're doing is translating information from one encoding to another. Human intelligence is not creating the information about the star's spectrum, only recording it. It does not take intelligence to create information.

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I probably agree with this more than I disagree with it, but there are limits.Information easily manipulates other information. I am information, I can sit down and write a computer program which is information and that program can spew out all kinds of information. So, I agree that information is useful to model information.The deal is that the electrons flowing through the motherboard are matter. Where you guys miss the boat is that if your computer programs REALLY created more information than it initially contained, it would violate the first law of thermodynamics or the law of conservation of matter in that energy can be changed, but never created nor destroyed.Do you really think one could get more information out of the Encyclopedia Britannica than it contains? I don't. I think the only way a program can build information is to use other information already in that program and program it to flow where one wants it to flow.

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This is the second time you've said this in this thread without offering any support.

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I can't support the negative because if something didn't happen there would be no evidence either way. You guys claim it happened, it will also be up to you to show it did.

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Finding mammals in Cambrian layers would falsify evolution.

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Why? We find all kind of things in the Cambrian where there is no evidence we find leading up to them. That doesn't falsify it and it's highly likely that finding one more would even if it were a mammal. You guys would just come up with a new story to explain it away.

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The basic process of evolution, descent with modification and natural selection, has been scientifically verified in the lab and wild both morphologically and genetically, and these experimental verifications are open to falsification. Evolution is testable and verifiable.

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Like what? Papers, please......

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The basic tenet of ID, as I understand it, is not that evolution is unscientific or impossible, but that it is insufficient as a theory explaining the diversity of life.

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Well, no. Had evolution happened the way people postulate I would think it would explain diversity just fine.

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The inherent problem with your version of ID is that it implicitly but inevitably invokes the supernatural. If it were really true that information can never arise via natural processes, then the first life in the universe could only have come about through supernatural means.

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No, not only the supernatural. Designers can create information without a problem. It's nature that cannot. I can go to a random number generator and make it spit out as much information as you want. Nature cannot

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Design Dynamics

Hey, Jazz:

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What you basically described here is natural selection. You start from a state and modify it randomly (i.e. flipping the coins). You then choose which a subset of the state to fix and modify the non fixed subset randomly. Repeat.

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Are you advocating that ID is actually equivalent to Intelligent Selection? If so, how would we distinguish this from Natural Selection where environmental pressures are the factors "deciding" which new random state is fit?

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No, because natural selection is not intelligent selection unless one wishes to view this from the perspective of the theistic evolutionist and then we have nature out and the supernatural in.If I observe a group of coins, intelligently select what I wish to keep and intelligently reject what I don't, that's design by intelligence: ID.NS doesn't work that way. The organism gets whatever environment it is in and that's the way it is. The next environment could conceivably remove everything the previous one caused. IOW, there is no constant selection toward anything in nature like there is with the coins.

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Design Dynamics

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You're confusing matter and energy with information. Information is not governed by the laws of thermodynamics.

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Not really because in most situations information is matter.Can you think of information that is not matter? Boltzmann considered his atoms as information, Shannon's electrons flowing through switching stations were information, the chalk on the blackboard that communicates information is matter, the ink on the paper of a letter is matter, the information stored on computer chips that one sees on the computer monitor while typing is matter, the photons hitting the nerve behind the eyeball telling one how cute that girl is, is matter; the sound waves in the form of moving air hitting the eardrums allowing one to place information into his brain via hearing is matter. And finally, all information that has been communicated to an organism is matter in the form of neurons and the firing process of those cells as the organism processes data and stores information in the brain.How far off would I be Percy, to extrapolate Einstein's formula into I = MC^2??

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Genetic algorithms can produce designs untouched by human minds. They do this by harnessing the evolutionary process in a design context. Random errors are created in a population of designs, oftentimes a simulation of sexual sharing of "genes" is employed, and the resulting "offspring" designs are assessed against the design goals. Those that measure up the best are selected to contribute to the next generation. If it helps you understand this, look at it as one member of the class of successive approximation approaches to problem solving.

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I'm not dissing genetic algorithms as I can see that they have their place in research (I tried to make that clear). But we cannot go so far as to think that the results actually translate into anything we see happening in nature. The people I have debated on this will normally just admit this up front.The problems these create in teaching the subject is that some people actually seem to think that the papers Adami has written using Avida simulations as in calculating entropy in the genome is also applicable to what we find in nature. This is simply nonsense as the simulations do not match real-life studies. So, we are fine here unless someone tries to extrapolate algorithms to real life. If they don't, I don't have a problem. Go for it.

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Just saying this indicates you don't yet understand how genetic algorithms work. Here's a brief and very simple example.

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Let us say we want to build a word guessing program using a genetic algorithm. We define the program's operational behavior from the point of view of the user like this:

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Print "Please think of a word and I will guess it."

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User types "OK".

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Print "How many letters are in the word?"
User types in the number of letters.

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Program prints out 10 guesses.

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User types number of correct letters for each guess.

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If none of the guesses were completely correct, program picks the top five guesses and allows each to produce two offspring, each different from the parent by only a single random letter, then program returns to step 5.

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If one or more of the guesses is correct, print the word and "Thank you for playing!"
That's how simple it is (naturally it can get much more complicated). In this case the user does the selecting himself. There's no mystery to genetic algorithms. There's no secret information from the programmers.

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Another way to think of it is like the game of hotter/colder, where you search for an object in the room that someone is thinking of while they give you feedback about whether or not you're getting warmer. You discard your movements that brought a "colder" response, and you continue with movements that brought a "warmer" response. In the same way, genetic algorithms continue building on a design that evaluates as "Better, though still not good enough", while discarding those that evaluate as "Worse" or "Better, but not as good as some others".

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All of this is well and good, but you seem to be missing my point. This is intelligence. This resembles NOTHING that can be found in nature. Have fun with the programs but don't confuse this with real life. If you do, the next time you get lost in the woods, start playing the hot and cold game with the trees and see how quickly you find your car.

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Well put your mind at rest. You won't have to support a negative because quite obviously something happened.

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On this, we can all agree.

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What the theory of evolution actually does is propose a mechanism to explain how it happened, i.e., why fossils appear in the order they do, why life's diversity is spread across the planet in the way it is, etc.

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But all it does is to propose it. Therefore, thus far, you have an observation. Now what are you going to do experimentally to get this to the hypothesis level? You haven't even done that yet much less reached the theory level.

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The creatures of the Cambrian explosion tended to have soft-bodied ancestors that did not fossilize well, though predecessors are slowly being found. But a mammal in the Cambrian would require millions and millions of years of hard skeletoned ancestors that would have fossilized but didn't. A mammal in the Cambrian could not have come about through an evolutionary process. It would represent a serious problem for evolution.

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It's still silly as there WERE no mammals on earth during that era. You cannot falsify something by proposing an impossibility as the falsification criteria. Did you know I can falsify that God is dead? The next time you are in your bedroom, just conjure up the devil and he will tell you. Can we stay in science here?Anyhow, I saw your point the first time around. But I also hope you grasped mine in that this is such a religiously biased 'science' that it wouldn't falsify anything. People would just back up, pluck a new theory out of the air to explain the mammal much as Gould and Eldredge did with punk eek and keep right on trucking as if no mammal was found there to begin with.

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You've drifted off your original point. If you recall, in Message 22 you claimed that evolution wasn't testable or falsifiable.

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No. Please keep my terms separate. I claimed that Darwinism isn't falsifiable.

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What I was saying in the portion you quoted was that this isn't the traditional objection of ID to evolution. Most IDists accept evolution as a valid scientific theory, Behe most prominent among them. Rejecting evolution because you believe it is unscientific makes you a rather unusual IDist.

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Actually, that would be better stated as "some" IDists accept common descent. Behe, Gene and others are in the minority but they do exist. Dembski, Cordova, myself and others take an opposing view. There are several camps developing in ID just as there are your closed universalists verses your flat universalists, relativity gravitists verses graviton gravitists in physics, etc.

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You've somehow missed the crucial (and obvious) implication. If your claim that information can not be created by natural processes but only only by intelligence is true, then the first intelligence in the universe had to have come about by supernatural means. That conclusion is inescapable. The theistic roots of your ID "theory" are painfully obvious to everyone but IDists.

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Why could this intelligence not have come from another universe? We don't have to get into metaphysics if one ponders how this could occur through a singularity in a black hole. It may not be so painfully obvious if you discard norms of mundane thinking and go a bit deeper.

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As I pointed out earlier, it does not take intelligence to create information.

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Not simple information. But it certainly does with complex specified information as in the type found in organisms. The latter is simply mathematically impossible.

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Design Dynamics

Welcome Zyncod:

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First of all, information (intelligently designed or not) is CONSTANTLY increasing in an entropic universe. When entropy causes a salt crystal to dissolve in water, do you think that there is more information about the position of Na/Cl ions in the rigidly ordered crystal (easily compressed information) or in randomly dissolved ions (impossibly compressed information)?

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Unfortunately, you have this exactly bass ackwards. Information is the opposite of entropy (see Boltzmann). Information is just like energy in that it is maxed when concentrated. As it diffuses, entropy increases.This is easily shown mathematically using a simple statistical formula like S = ln(W) where S is entropy and W is the microstates of the information. If we divide a teaspoon of sugar into 10 gridded areas and then the cup of tea in which it diffuses into 150 we have:State 1: S = ln(10) = 2.30State 2: S = ln(150) = 5.01deltaS = S(final) - S(intial), delta S = 5.01 - 2.30 = 2.71The entropy and therefore the disorganization has increased. You have lost information.

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Second of all, when you talk about DNA replication in the lab (sorry, I don't know how to use quotes), you are talking about PCR - polymerase chain reaction. In nature, the primers are not designed, but are synthesized according to the template DNA when replication occurs in the 5'->3' direction (since you used that quote, I assume you know what the above sentence means- if you don't, read about Okazaki fragments). And DNA can be synthesized from scratch in labs - that's how we make the designed primers.

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Ok, so what? My point is that DNA is not synthesized outside of an organism in nature. If you are taking issue with the article I posted, fine. But that doesn't change my argument. In fact, you seem to be agreeing with me on this.

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Furthermore, a supposedly "CSI" DNA fragment can be made without any other DNA - HIV replicates using RNA genomes that "reverse transcribe" into DNA. And RNA (ribozymes) is capable of catalytic functions (i.e, self-excising introns)- which means that it's not too much of a stretch to imagine self-replicating RNA. Since most ribozymes are less than 300 bases long, it is also not too much of a stretch to imagine that self-replicating RNA could have arose given that there was an entire planet to experiment upon. And that would be the definition of life - replication.

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Oh I can imagine a lot of things, doesn't necessarily give it any credibility in science. How do you know this is CSI? You are going to have to calculate it out to show this. And you think that replication is the definition of life? Then further define the word replication and we will go from there. I shall be respectful and hold comments on this until you define your terms appropriately.

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But I actually, instead of the usual position where the evolutionist refutes the IDist argument, would like to take a different tack. I want you to explain something for me.

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Evolutionary theory supposes that any mutation that does not have a negative effect on the reproductive success of the organism in question will essentially be "ignored" by evolution and will persist or die out based upon its chromosomal proximity to positive/negative alleles or stochastically. ID theory supposes that everything about the organism is designed, so there is a reason for every base pair in the genome.

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I would explain this for you, but you base the entire question on a false conception of ID. ID espouses that the genotype of extant organisms are a result of both initial design and evolution. In fact, this is the way we explain the supposed incompetence of the designer as some Darwinists (I don't argue with evolutionists, I am one. I just argue with Darwinists) seem to picture. This is to be fully expected. Hence, you simply misunderstand ID when you assume that everything we see in the genotype is a result of design.

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Evolutionary theory can explain why there is a non-functional vitamin C synthesis gene in all primates (as an omnivore, the primate ancestor had sufficient vitamin C in their diet and the nonfunctional vitamin C gene allele became fixed stochastically/linkage to a separate successful gene allele).

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No it can't. There is no such thing as evolutionary theory as you have taken nothing through the scientific method TO the theory level. I'm a science purest, so let's keep our terminology correct. Biology explains this, not Darwinism.

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ID theory would state that there is some reason for the non-working vitamin C synthesis allele in all primates (which are coincidentally, said to be related by evolutionary theory). What exactly would this reason be? And if ID theory cannot answer this question, what exactly is the use of this theory?

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There is no such thing as a theory of ID and ID has nothing to say about the non-working vitamin C synthesis allele in primates. Again, this is biology. What you need to do, is to come to learn to think about this using the proper perspective. As a Darwinist you view biology with a different paradigm than do I, an ID theorist. It's still all biology. There is no ID biology. There is no Darwinist biology. You have not staked a claim to anything in science other than to flood academia with pseudo-science.You seem to see this mutation as some quasi-divine uber-manifest of the god of Darwin in action speaking with epiphanic thunder-vox. I see it for what it is, biology, with a simple, common sense explanation.Lower life progressed to more complex life, both plant and animal, over time. At a given point in time vitamin C became quite prevalent in the diet as it is today. Now am I going to have to bring an argument to you that some plants today are rich in vitamin C like I had to with the other one I was recently discussing this with? No? Thank you.When this C became available in the diet, omnivores that ingested this C no longer needed to systemically produce C and natural selection caused this mutation. And in what organisms would this environment have selected for? ALL of them, people, chimps, gorillas, little funky tree monkeys, little monkin' tree.........So you are quite surprised to see this mutation in common with primates? Now. Since the rest of your post is based on a non-existent theory of ID, or non-existent ID theorems and badly confuses evolution, which is noted both in Darwinism AND ID with Darwinism, clarify all of that, respond to the above and we'll boogie with this discussion.Thanks for your post. Oh, again....welcome!

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Design Dynamics

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1. How do you tell the difference between intelligent selection and natural selection?

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In what case? Where there is no intelligence, I would think if selection occurs we might rule out intelligence. But I don't know that there's a universal rule. Are you suggesting that natural selection was also intelligent selection? If you are a theistic evolutionist, I have no problem with this, but other than this, I would have to ask you where the intelligence came from.

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2. How do you eliminate the possibility that a very strict environment might cause a type of natural selection that looks like intelligent selection? (i.e. an environment that only and always allows the heads side of the coin to be fixed)

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Who am I to rule out models before I consider them. Present one and I will. Describe this strict environment and explain what it is doing to the organism.

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3. If we somehow show intelligence, how does this refute common ancestry?

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I don't know that it does. Shouldn't we be trying to confirm or falsify common ancestry?

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Changing how things are selected does not change the paradigm that much. If you somehow show all of this is true all that means is that a different selection force is what caused evolution. I don't see how your position is in conflict with the modern theory of evolution yet you keep saying that things like the evolution of the mammalian inner ear are impossible. This seems to be a contradiction in position. Please clarify.

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First, please clarify yourself and come to use these terms more precisely. When you speak of evolution of the inner ear, this just means a change over time in the inner ear not how it originated. Second, I don't even recall discussing the inner ear. Can you link me back??

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Design Dynamics

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But let me move beyond that to another question... what criteria allows you, Dembski, and others to oppose the position taken by Behe on common descent? And I don't mean lack of info, I mean what positive info do you have for a model with no descent and only multiple creation events?

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As far as I understand it Dembski does not deal with any physical evidence at all, and is only part of constructing the mathematical and philosophical tools necessary to detect design. I am unsure how one who does not work with the fossil evidence can possibly claim to have evidence for multiple creation events, rather than a single initial creation, with descent unpacking from preprogrammed data?

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Well I'm not Dembski. I think I've pointed this out to you before, if not it was someone else and forget that. If you have questions for him, go over to one of his sites and ask him. Finally, I don't oppose any positions Behe has in ID because common descent doesn't have a thing to do with ID.As to the rest of your post....um...your posts are beginning to get a tad silly. I saw another one somewhere to me something to the effect that the second law no longer applies to chemical reactions in open system. I'll answer what I can of this one but don't expect a whole lot of enthusiasm in the future to answering this stuff.

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Design Dynamics