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Author Topic:   Current status/developments in Intelligent Design Theory
CK
Member (Idle past 4127 days)
Posts: 3221
Joined: 07-04-2004


Message 61 of 112 (212184)
05-28-2005 8:09 PM
Reply to: Message 60 by mick
05-28-2005 6:57 PM


Re: Origins & Design journal
The ARN homepage tells me everything I need to know...
http://www.arn.org/index.html

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 Message 60 by mick, posted 05-28-2005 6:57 PM mick has replied

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mick
Member (Idle past 4985 days)
Posts: 913
Joined: 02-17-2005


Message 62 of 112 (212185)
05-28-2005 8:23 PM
Reply to: Message 61 by CK
05-28-2005 8:09 PM


Re: Origins & Design journal
Yup, I've been posting on their forums a bit (under the same name). Somebody there put me onto http://www.iscid.org/pcid.php which is another rather silly journal you folks may wish to investigate.
I recommend Complex Specification (CS): A New Proposal For Identifying Intelligence as one of the sillier articles. Apparently, when faced with a random five-letter word, we can tell whether that word was intelligently designed or not by looking it up in an english dictionary. For those who want to know, of the 13 bits of information that make up a five-letter word in english, 10 are specified intelligence and the remainder are unintelligent. Cool!
Mick
This message has been edited by mick, 05-28-2005 08:28 PM

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Andya Primanda
Inactive Member


Message 63 of 112 (212618)
05-30-2005 10:44 AM
Reply to: Message 60 by mick
05-28-2005 6:57 PM


Re: Origins & Design journal
It's not even recent. AFAIK Michael Denton has now changed his mind, abandoned ID for theistic evolution and now pretty much unheard among the ID guys.

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 64 of 112 (213771)
06-03-2005 6:53 AM


Johnathan Wells (Not a dealer in magic and spells at all in fact)
I think this is appropriate to this thread, and I couldn't see it having been referenced previously.
The latest edition of that estimable organ Rivista Di Biologia has a paper in it from Johnathan Wells about the possibility that centrioles provide a motive force which causes chromosomes to move away from the mitotic spindles they are attached to during cell division.
Wells says this is based on ID principles.
Instead of viewing centrioles through the spectacles
of molecular reductionism and neo-Darwinism, this hypothesis assumes
that they are holistically designed to be turbines.
Although how this differs from assuming they have evolved to perform a function similar to a turbine is unclear to me.
I haven't read the paper yet, I'm not sure if my university takes Rivista, it certainly doens't have online accesss unfortunately.
TTFN,
WK
P.S. There are many other interesting articles in this issue of Rivista, including the eventual publication of JAD's 'Prescribed evolutionary hypothesis'.

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mick
Member (Idle past 4985 days)
Posts: 913
Joined: 02-17-2005


Message 65 of 112 (213865)
06-03-2005 12:26 PM
Reply to: Message 64 by Wounded King
06-03-2005 6:53 AM


Re: Johnathan Wells (Not a dealer in magic and spells at all in fact)
Hi WK,
I've seen a few articles like this. The authors toss the word "design" about but don't actually discuss intelligent design, which is of course the contentious point.
It is perfectly reasonable to think that centrioles, lungs, white blood cells etc. are well designed. But it has nothing to do with the idea that intelligent agency was behind that design. Daniel Dennett has been referring to evolution by natural selection as "design work" for decades now, and he definitely isn't into ID!
Mick

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 66 of 112 (214620)
06-06-2005 5:39 AM
Reply to: Message 64 by Wounded King
06-03-2005 6:53 AM


Re: Johnathan Wells (Not a dealer in magic and spells at all in fact)
Helpfully J (W) Wells helps us out himself by telling us exactly how he used ID as the basis for his armchair theorising.
First of all, ID encourages a closer look at centrosomes and centrioles. They are not very interesting from a Darwinian evolutionary standpoint, in fact they are totally uninteresting. I have submitted this paper . to several journals. The first one, the editor was a strong evolutionary biologist, and his reaction was ”well, we are not interested in theories of centrosomal function, we just want more molecules, you should just go out and give us those.’ This is the molecular reductionist emphasis that I attribute to Darwinian evolution. ID liberates us from that first of all. It encourages us to take cell structures or living structures at face value. I mean, this thing looks for all the world like a turbine, it’s been called a turbine for decades by cell biologists, but nobody - and I’ve searched the literature - nobody has proposed that it’s a turbine before. I think it might be, you know. It’s worth a shot. ID in a broader sense encourages this sort of cellular perspective, organismal perspective, as opposed to the bottom-up molecular perspective, but the most specific instance in this case is the turbine idea. Well, I would say the Archimedes Screw too - it looks like a screw, maybe it is a screw. . maybe it is a vortexer, and it turns out the effect would be similar to what we have observed in cells for decades. So, ID encourages one to trust your intuition, to make the leap. You know, if it looks like this, maybe it is, let’s look in to it. Maybe it fits, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s worth a shot. And so it’s not that ID says ”Yes, this is where it is, you have to find it here’ - ID is more of an umbrella, a framework, that encourages this sort of risky hypothesis making that I think could ultimately be very fruitful
I wonder why he thinks there is no interest in Centrosomes or centrioles amongst biological researchers Pubmed returns 141 articles published so far this year, including Wells' own, for the search 'centrosome OR centriole'.
TTFN,
WK

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 Message 67 by mick, posted 06-06-2005 11:37 AM Wounded King has replied

  
mick
Member (Idle past 4985 days)
Posts: 913
Joined: 02-17-2005


Message 67 of 112 (214656)
06-06-2005 11:37 AM
Reply to: Message 66 by Wounded King
06-06-2005 5:39 AM


Re: Johnathan Wells (Not a dealer in magic and spells at all in fact)
Hi wounded king,
WK writes:
I wonder why he thinks there is no interest in Centrosomes or centrioles amongst biological researchers
Perhaps he is submitting to the wrong journals or something? If he submitted his article to molecular biology journals then perhaps they wouldn't be interested in the "ultimate causation" behind the system as much as the molecular machinery involved. But there are of course plenty of integrative biology journals that would be happy with this kind of issue.
I think he was being a little disingenuous in the quote you provided. It's a bit strange to claim that Darwinism doesn't permit one to use the metaphor of the turbine. We use metaphors all the time! He appears to be accusing evolutionary biologists of reductionism at the molecular level, which is kind of interesting as the "inability" of evolutionary theory to account for the translation of genotype into phenotype is usually one of the arguments they level against us.
In any case, the argument for design that he provides is not very strong. He describes a highly functionalist philosophy (the thing is what it does, the reason the thing exists is to perform the action it does, etc.). This is exactly the kind of thinking that got sociobiologists into trouble a decade or two ago. When evolutionary biologists use this kind of thinking, we are criticized for telling "just-so stories". But when IDists do it, it is a refreshing new paradigm!
Mick

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 68 of 112 (214662)
06-06-2005 12:40 PM
Reply to: Message 67 by mick
06-06-2005 11:37 AM


Re: Johnathan Wells (Not a dealer in magic and spells at all in fact)
Actually the most likely reason for the rejection to my mind is that the whole thing is purely theoretical, so it wouldn't be suitable for any of the normal research based journals. Hence just waving your hands and saying 'it's a turbine', would fail to qualify in the absence of a molecular basis for its function as a turbine.
In fact it seems remarkably redundant given the amount of work done on looking at the basis of eukaryotic flagellar motion given how the commonality of the basal structures of the flagella and cilia to the centrioles.
TTFN,
WK
This message has been edited by Wounded King, 06-06-2005 12:43 PM

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ramoss
Member (Idle past 611 days)
Posts: 3228
Joined: 08-11-2004


Message 69 of 112 (215105)
06-07-2005 5:20 PM
Reply to: Message 68 by Wounded King
06-06-2005 12:40 PM


Re: Johnathan Wells (Not a dealer in magic and spells at all in fact)
I would say that it is not 'theortical' in the scientific sense (it is not testable), but merely speculation Theortical in science is different than the layman's term.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 68 by Wounded King, posted 06-06-2005 12:40 PM Wounded King has replied

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 70 of 112 (215113)
06-07-2005 5:58 PM
Reply to: Message 69 by ramoss
06-07-2005 5:20 PM


Re: Johnathan Wells (Not a dealer in magic and spells at all in fact)
Unfortunately I haven't had access to the full paper, so I can't make a definitive statement, but this seems to be a claim that certainly could be tested. I don't see why centrioles could not be formed in vitro and in some way be tested for force generation. If the force is strong enough to move the chromosomes I'm sure it would produce a detectable force on some sort of sensor.
This lab look at the motion of chromosomes during mitosis in order to determine the forces acting on them, I dont see why a similar approach couldn't be tried in vitro with centrioles and some easily traceable small molecule.
TTFN,
WK

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Silent H
Member (Idle past 5819 days)
Posts: 7405
From: satellite of love
Joined: 12-11-2002


Message 71 of 112 (222933)
07-10-2005 11:09 AM


Intelligent Design winning over Catholic Church
Just this week a Cardinal on the Vatican's congregation for Catholic education wrote an op-ed piece, distancing the Catholic Church from its recent support of evolution and backing language from Intelligent Design.
Here is a link to a NY Times article about the op-ed piece and what it means for the future of evolution in Catholic education (apologies to those who don't have a free subscription to NYTimes). Here are some excerpts...
An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with Catholic faith.The cardinal, Christoph Schnborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."
In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's election in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about the church's position on evolution. "I said I would like to have a more explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on," said Cardinal Schnborn.
He said that he had been "angry" for years about writers and theologians, many Catholics, who he said had "misrepresented" the church's position as endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.
This will come as a potential blow to everyone stating that the Church accepts evolution. It is now moving towards ID, and interestingly enough the whole op-ed letter appears to be the result of the Discovery Institute pushing the Cardinal to help them out...
One of the strongest advocates of teaching alternatives to evolution is the Discovery Institute in Seattle...
Mark Ryland, a vice president of the institute, said in an interview that he had urged the cardinal to write the essay. Both Mr. Ryland and Cardinal Schnborn said that an essay in May in The Times... suggested to them that it was time to clarify the church's position on evolution.
The cardinal's essay was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute.
Mr. Ryland, who said he knew the cardinal through the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria, where he is chancellor and Mr. Ryland is on the board, said supporters of intelligent design were "very excited" that a church leader had taken a position opposing Darwinian evolution. "It clarified that in some sense the Catholics aren't fine with it," he said.
Bruce Chapman, the institute's president, said the cardinal's essay "helps blunt the claims" that the church "has spoken on Darwinian evolution in a way that's supportive."
I guess this counts as a "current development" in Intelligent Design. No new information, but a new adherent within the Catholic church willing to spread their gospel. I wonder if he ever managed to see some of their writings against Catholicism?

holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Replies to this message:
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Brad McFall
Member (Idle past 5032 days)
Posts: 3428
From: Ithaca,NY, USA
Joined: 12-20-2001


Message 72 of 112 (222939)
07-10-2005 12:30 PM
Reply to: Message 71 by Silent H
07-10-2005 11:09 AM


Re: Intelligent Design winning over Catholic Church
I never noticed any real "backing" of evolution as is widely ported about the past Popes 96 writing but instead I saw in whatever most orginial sources I could read found an explanation distancing from divisions in the sciences themselves. This I recently wrote as a difference between biochemical instruction and biophysical manifested instantiation here on EVC.
The only real intellectual point seems to be if Wolfram is wrong or not. That bears on IC somewhat lest our human notion of phase transitions is just not solid enough. If free will is associated with molecular freepath lengths of expressed genes via entropy increases if operating different levels of selection in the same category of causality by a shifting balance of the particular level of organization in object per deme
Indeed, in the case of small particles the energy of thermal motion kBT>>En. (En is the energy of natural magnetic, electric, and gravity fields acting on the particle.) Still, for sufficiently large structures the inverse is valid: En >>kBT. Hence, the relative contribution of the corresponding terms is large. While passing from lower evolution to higher ones, one can also observe variations of the relative contributions of the terms characterizing surface, photochemical, magnetic-hydrodynamic, deformational, and other kinds of work.
quote:
http://www.endeav.org/evolut/age/dem/dem.htm
exist, then Wolfram's morphogenic growth is not generalizable and his good will fails (no matter the transition etc) where he analyzed transifinte math. The rest is just different positioning of the philosophy of math for the future benefit of life on Earth.
This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 07-10-2005 12:32 PM

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jar
Member (Idle past 393 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 73 of 112 (222945)
07-10-2005 12:43 PM
Reply to: Message 71 by Silent H
07-10-2005 11:09 AM


Re: Intelligent Design winning over Catholic Church
It's a sad development but not yet an official statement. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
This message has been edited by jar, 07-10-2005 11:43 AM

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1466 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 74 of 112 (222948)
07-10-2005 12:59 PM
Reply to: Message 73 by jar
07-10-2005 12:43 PM


Re: Intelligent Design winning over Catholic Church
Huh, the Catholic Church moving towards creationism? Who could have possibly predicted that?
Oh, right - me.
I think that the Catholic church is going to get a little more than they bargained for with this guy. He seems like the type to push through a bunch of "reforms" while he has the chance.
Is it possible we have the first creationist pope? I don't know much but I have a feeling that the likelyhood is strong.
EvC Forum: New Pope Thread
Man, I'm getting tired of being so right all the time.
Hey, Phatboy, remember when you told me this?
quote:
No. His views on evolution are essentially identical to his predecessors.
A clear indication that it's better to do your homework and learn the facts, rather than making decisions based on feelings.
Wrong again, Phatboy.
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sidelined
Member (Idle past 5907 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 75 of 112 (223067)
07-11-2005 3:09 AM
Reply to: Message 71 by Silent H
07-10-2005 11:09 AM


Re: Intelligent Design winning over Catholic Church
Holmes
I fired off a letter to the Discovery Institute asking for a clarification of the Intelligent Design model as well as an explanation for their involvement with the Catholic Church in direct violation of their stated position,and I quote
Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text. Honest critics of intelligent design acknowledge the difference between intelligent design and creationism. University of Wisconsin historian of science Ronald Numbers is critical of intelligent design, yet according to the Associated Press, he "agrees the creationist label is inaccurate when it comes to the ID [intelligent design] movement." Why, then, do some Darwinists keep trying to conflate intelligent design with creationism?
Seems to me there is a need by the Creation Instiute to clarify matters and to answer questions regarding this. I also proposed some conundrums with modern physics that render a designer highly improbable and also question what the nature of intelligence is with the designer they have proposed.I have mentioned that they can defend their position and I will keep a running tab on how much time passes before a response is forthcoming and post both my letter and the response on a thread should such an unlikely event occur.
Do you wonder why they would need the Pope on their side if their "science" can stand on it's own? Is the Pope an expert on either evolution or Intelligent Design? Inquiring minds want to know.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry

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