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Member (Idle past 5819 days) Posts: 7405 From: satellite of love Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Current status/developments in Intelligent Design Theory | |||||||||||||||||||
Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
Is that a suitable project for this thread> Maybe we should start a new thread for a more in-depth dissection of the papers put forward.
TTFN, WK P.S. I've just skimmed through the Axe paper.
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
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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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
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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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
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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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
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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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
I'm not sure how much this really resemble any sort of change in emphasis. James Randi suggests here that the commonly used phrasing showin the Church's support of evolution elides some important points which suggest that in fact the Catholic Church has always had a fairly firm intelligent design agenda.
TTFN, WK
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
This "complexity" has also not been specified Which is ironic since they call it 'Specified complexity'. TTFN, WK
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
The signal they are looking for has to be repetitive or in a sequence. When they find this signal they will deem it came from an Inteligent source. *BZZZZT* Sorry, wrong answer, but thank you for playing. There are any number of astronomical objects which could create signals which are repetitive or sequential, think about pulsars. In fact there have been a number of signals which have matched SETIs first pass criteria based on the elimination of random noise and the direction of travel of the signal across the reciever, but none that have been traceable to an alien intelligence.
Also just a thought. ~A cell needs information to be made. ~Information has to be stored somewhere. (In a cell) Using the evolutionary model, how can this start. A modern cell certainly needs the information contained in DNA to be made but a number of cellular structures, such as the phospholipid bilayers seen in cell membranes can form simply due to their own chemical composition and environment and can go on to form micelles which resemble the phospholipd bilayer. The corrolary statement of your second part is false, the information must be there, but it doesn't have to be in a cell. It could be in a genetic material such as RNA or DNA, although such materials need a relatively protective environment taht could be equated to a cell. Some information could even, as I suggested before, be imparted from the environment in which the cell forms. You might want to familiarise yourself with some of the work the prooponent of ID have already done on defining the sort of things that might constitute a valid 'signal' in DNA or biology in general, because it is considerbaly better developed than your tentative steps along this path. Most of your post just consists of hefty chunks of assertion with absoloutely no evidence to support it. TTFN, WK
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
There was a very interesting article posted recently on the 'Panda's Thumb' blog. It gave some details of a conference organised by some ID proponents as a retrospective on a Gordon conference from the 60's on 'Mathematical challenges to the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution.'
The post, here, gives details of talks by a number of speakers, including most of the leading lights of the ID movement, i.e. Dembski, Behe, Doug Axe and Jonathan Wells. One particularly interesting point is that at least a couple of the speakers seemed to have actually done some actual research, in a lab even! The first, non-lab based, was Doug Axe talking about a system his company has developed for searching for novel functional protein sequences based on the similarity of the protein sequence to chinese Han characters, which seems somewhat arbitrary but maybe it works. Whether it works or not though seems to have little to do with ID or evolution. The second, and most interesting from the sound of it,talk including novel research was from Dr. Ann Gauger of the relatively recently established Biologic Institute. From the sound of it the basic hypothesis her experimental work was designed to address was a pretty thin strawman of evolution but the execution was solid. She also appears to have related experimental data showing a novel beneficial mutation arising (shurely shome mishtake?). I think anyone wanting to get an update on the current state of ID thought and ID research would be well advised to have a read through this post, especially since the ID people who organised the conference seem to be in no hurry to publicise any of it. TTFN, WK
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
The first, non-lab based, was Doug Axe talking about a system his company has developed for searching for novel functional protein sequences based on the similarity of the protein sequence to chinese Han characters, which seems somewhat arbitrary but maybe it works. Whether it works or not though seems to have little to do with ID or evolution. An update on this line of research. Axe has just got this work published in PlosOne (Axe et al., 2008). I haven't had time to look over it properly but it doesn't seem to say anything about intelligent design. It seems quite interesting and it may be a useful simulation system, its hard to say just from what I have read so far. TTFN, WK
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