Is ID Scientific? (was "Abusive Assumptions")

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...darwins falsifiibility statement is satisfied by the removal of carbon atoms from any living system or life form because it is then non-life and cannot be produced from a previous "simpler" version that uses another type of atom and functions just as well...

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Actually, that doesn't satisfy any falsifiability criterion of the statement of evolution. All known living cells contain carbon, therefore it may be assumed that the first living cells contained carbon.Edited to add:All living cells also use DNA. Remove the DNA and no cell will remain alive. But since the common ancestor of all known life probably used DNA this also doesn't falsify evolution; it simply means that the use of DNA, like being made from carbon, is the evolutionary heritage from the common ancestor.This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 09-Aug-2005 10:31 PM

It is a shame to have come all this way only to find out that Evopeach doesn't understand Darwin's falsification statement. If we had known this earlier I'm sure that someone could have set him straight.Darwin's statement was, essentially, that his theory (of common descent through small modifications) would be falsified if it could be shown that there is any complex organ in any species which could not have arisen from earlier precursors through small modification. The presence of carbon in living species is not an organ in any sense of the word, and so Darwins statement does not apply to it.At any rate, the importance of carbon as a building material in all life can be explained by the theory of evolution by postulatiing that carbon was an important material in the first ancestral organisms; then the importance of carbon in present life is simply explained as the chemical heritage of our common ancestor.The use of carbon in life in no way provides a refutation of the theory of evolution.