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Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Evidence of design .... ? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
Would someone care to list the evidences for design in
biological systems ? Peter Borger seems to be hooked on: 1) Genetic redundancies. These are genes which, if knocked out, do not affect theviability of the organism (i.e. it is not fatal to not have them). His claim seems to be something like, that if there is no differencein rate of change in such genes compared to necessary genes then NS selection cannot be happening and so design must be the solution. I would suggest that::i) Genes which can be modified or de-activated without killing the organism would be necessary for evolution to work. ii) Selection, and so rates of change is not about the gene and whether it makes an organism viable, but about its fitness to the environment in which it finds itself. iii) If other genes on the same chromosome are selected for that will have an impact on change rates for all genes in that chromosome. My conclusion:: Genetic redundancies do not provide sufficient or necessary evidence of design. 2) Non-random mutations PB suggests that mutations are not random, and so there is onlythe illusion of common descent within the different genomes studied by bioogists. I say that the non-randomness that PB relates is not non-randomin the sense of the when and why a mutation becomes fixed in a population, but might indicate the presence of a repair mechanism at work which could mitigate the negative effects of mutations should they occur. In any case if the end result 'looks like common descent', thencommon descent is an equally likely explanation as any other, and so PB has effectively restated the argument that:: common design is indistinguishable from common descent. My concusion::It is not sufficient evidence of design. Are there other design evidences that anyone would care to putforward? Complexity doesn't count, because it has no relation to design.A hammer is designed, but hardly complex. IC has also been put forward -- there are other threads on that,but it basically comes down to an inability to believe that certain biological features could have developed over time. I guess what I am after is a reference list of design evidencesso that we can start a more focussed discussion on the subject.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
.... and then there's always alternate function, too ...
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
It states nothing of the kind.
Certain physical properties of the universe exist,and it is likely that adaptations that take advantage of them will develop. It is by no means certain, however ... and certainly doesnot suggest that they were designed into the universe.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
In case you weren't joking .... no-one says that's how
evolution of the eye (or anything else for that matter) happened. Do a web-search and you will doubtless find severalsuggestions for how the eye could have developed.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
quote: Depending on how old your car is, it may be designed tobehave in this way to protect the passengers and drivers (by absorbing the brunt of the impact)... quite a good feature over-all.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
I'd have to agree, since logically if you know how
a designer would do it, you can rule out things as wouldn'ts if its not what the designer would do. If you see what I mean.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
quote: Not entirely, no. Take the combined opening of the air and food passagein humans. One would not expect this arrangement, which has no advantage, to appear in an intelligent design...and many other animals do not have this arrangement. I don't think it is too idealistic to expect a designer toensure that two necessary functions do not have a common mode failure ... and even more importantly that a fault in one essential system doesn't cause a separate, independent essential system to also fail.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
None of 1..4 cannot be accomodated by a design that doesn't
have a single point of failure. Your calculations are also way off. 13 incidents over a year resulted in fatalities, that doesnot tell us about unreported events or near-misses that have been averted by 'operator intervention'. Even then we have 13 incidents of failure in 8790 hourswhich is 1.5 X 10E-3 failures per hour. Safety critical systems designed by people have an allowablefailure rate of 10E-9 per hour, even military applications are only allowed 10E-8 per hour ... and non-critical automotive failures are acceptable at 10E-7 per hour. And your 13 was only in one state.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
I'm not sure that I said there was 'no advantage' to the
design, what I have said is that if a human design team were working on a similar problem that this design would have been rejected via the safety analysis. If humans engaged in design actively seek to elliminatecommon mode failures, and the human body has common mode failures in what way is there evidence for design? It's not about suggesting that ID == BestD at all. ID postulates that organisms exist due to an intelligent designer'sinterventions. To find suitable evidence of design we can look to existing designed systems and see if there are similarities between biological systems and what we would expect to find in an intellgently designed system. One feature of safety critical system design is safety analysisto identify potential failure modes and mitigate them. A further aspect of such analysis is the ellimination of common mode failures (especially in independent, critical sub-systems). Human bodies do not appear to have undergone any kind of designreview process or safety analysis because there are features present that even a human designer at our level of technology would reject. We are left with two possibilities (and sub-variants of) 1) The designer was not very good.2) There was no intelligence behind the design. 1..5 do not outweigh the dis-advantage. The disadvantage inthis case can lead to catastrophic system failure (i.e. death) none of the advantages you mention can possibly outweigh that. It's not about finding corrections for the sub-optimal ... it'sabout looking at known intelligent design processes and seeing if the human-solution appears to be designed based upon what we know of how we design things. You may not feel that failures per hour has much meaning ...the entire systems and safety community would tend to disagree since this is a probabalistic measure of failure in use in all human engineering. In a safety critical system ANY catastrophic failures that aredue to the design are intollerable. That's why failure rates are set at 10E-9. Mis-use is not a mitigation either. The people who choke do soduring an 'intended' (if human's were designed) function of the system. That the system can normally operate in a way that disrupts another safety critical system is NOT evidence that design effort has been put in.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
quote: My apologies, I shall be more careful with my wording.
quote: I'm not really talking about running through and correctingthe flaws. I'm talking about analysing the 'human body design' to find indications of intelligence behind that design. One aspect of engineering design approaches is safety analysis,and since there are safety critical functions within the human body one would expect an 'intelligent designer' to have analysed his/her/its design to remove design features that could operate to disrupt these safety critical functions. quote: Mr Hambre may have a slightly different view to myself. You areresponding to me within this post, however. IFF your IDer is the christian God, then Mr.Hambre is correct.Why would an omniscient, omnipotent God create anything that could be improved upon (and even would such a God be able to create something sub-optimal)? quote: I'm not comparing manufactured items with biological systems. I am applying what I know about human design approaches to thehuman body. If those design approaches indicate that a human design team would not have allowed something into the design then the case for intelligence is lessened. quote: The 'cost' depends on the value you place on a human life, and inthis case cannot be great since other animals have systems which effectively prevent this problem. quote: No, they are rooted in analysis (if somewhat limited in scope).The identification of something that would be considered a design flaw is sufficient to make comment on the intelligent design effort put in. The more serious the flaw, the lower the intelligence levelof the designer or the lower effort placed in design review. quote: Your missing the point. These failures are CAUSED by a design feature.
quote: So a car with brakes designed such thatwhen they fail they cause the steering to turn 90 degrees clockwise would be OK so long as the stereo was neat and it only happened 13 times a year? quote: And I'd be careful about bringing this up to support ID. What is the basic function of animal death? That is whyDo organisms need to die? Or reproduce for that matter. ... in the above I meant 'premature death' though. I have toadmit, and I have already promised to try to be more careful with my wording. quote: Failures per hour is a probablistic boundary value whichdesigns must gaurantee to meet in order to be considered safe. Safety analysis processes have defined boundaries for thisfor different categories of system. For safety critical systems this is 1E-9 per hour. It's the way its done. Your method is inferior as it is based upon an unsupportedassumption about the number of swallows per day, and incomplete 'choking' data. My value is based upon your data for catastrophic events.
quote: Tell that to the parents of those kids ... 1E-9 is the failure rate figure that airliners are designedto ... at no-expense spared. It seems your view on whether or not it is worth it is not that of the engineering community. Perhaps the IDer just doesn't care.
quote: You are quite correct ... it is not a designed flaw because thechain saw is not designed to cut soil. The arrangement we are discussion IS designed to swallow food,and to allow air in/out of the lungs. When people choke the throat is not (in general) being put toinapproriate use. quote: I've actually applied a certain level of analysis to theissue. 1) Breathing is a safety critical function.2) Eating is a mission critical function. ... I've just realised something. In terms of swallowing failure rate you may well be correctto say that the rate is acceptable. (2) is mission critical and if you fail to do it it doesn't have immediate negative consequences ... only continued failure will be a problem. (1) on the other hand is safety critical and a failure of aslittle as a couple of minutes can be catastrophic. This feature should be designed more rigorously. The problem (and I have pointed this out) is that thereis a causative chain of failure. A failure is sub-system (2) CAUSES a failure in sub-system (1). It is this that suggests low intelligence in the design. [Edited to change 10E-9 to 1E-9 ... got my notation mixedup there ... sorry!!!] [This message has been edited by Peter, 07-02-2003]
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
RE 1):
They also fail to mention that things like mousetrapsdidn't get invented from scratch over night ... or that the technologies for the common modern mousetrap were not originally invented purely for use in a mousetrap but were seen to be useful for that end product.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
Even more mundanely ... I don't believe that springs
were created with mousetraps in mind, rather someone tried a sping loaded mousetrap, and found that it worked quite well so they made some more ... that sounds quite natural selectioney for a mechanical analogy
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
quote: Careful, you might kick off a whole new branch of 'Science'.... 'Intelligent Evolution'!!!!
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