What exactly is ID?

Well, let us know when your face gets blown off, and we'll come and see why it happened.Until then, we know that your claims are refuted both by theory and by observation.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, let's leave aside your fatuous lies, and focus on your mere errors. That was funny. So, you don't even know the meaning of the words that you're using."Fitness is not proportionally corelated to biological functions", you say. That is most amusing. But Sanford's bibble about genetic entropy and genetic meltdown involves a reduction in fitness leading to extinction. If you are not being wrong about the same thing as him, why are you clinging to the same terms? No, I said that you hadn't quantified it. That's what I'm asking you. As soon as you give me your method for measuring the quantity of "information" in a strand of DNA, I shall prove that your latest blunder is wrong. Until then, your latest blunder is meaningless.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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The same way Nobel discovered dynamite. You don't test for it because you don't know what you are looking for. It blows up in your face when you get it right.

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In other words only functions that produce a violent and obvious reaction under Axe's working conditions would be noticed.

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I'm not agreeing with you. Obviously because teh description I'm using is detachable from the flagellum itself.

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Do you want to take back your definition of specification and try a new one then ?Look, the point you keep on missing is that the complexity is the probability of meeting the specification. So your real "specification" is the fabrication derived from the E Coli flagellum - because that is the is the basis of your attempted probability calculation.

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So what exactly is missing there? Was that not the full definition?

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As I told you at the start, not all the terms were defined. (And that would make it somewhat less than the full definition).

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I already did.

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Then direct me to the post where you produced it, because I have not seen anything of the sort. In fact all I have seen is incomplete references to the calculations based on a fabrication - I haven't even seen the results of any calculations using the real specification.

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I see no problem in that approach. If you do not agree, show me your number. And why it's supposed to be better.

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In other words if I do your work for you you MIGHT accept it as right. That's not exactly a generous offer. I've already produced an example demonstrating my point. That should be good enough.

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No it means we are talkign about 2 totally different instances of design. A flagellum that consists of 50 proteins, and a hypothetical one that consists of 5.000.000 proteins are two totally different pieces of design and should be calculated separately.

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Since design does not enter into complexity calculations this is a complete irrelevance. If both fit the specification, both must be considered.

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But you can't describe a salt crystal based on that pattern. You need to be able to describe it.

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A salt crystal has the structure of a face-centred cubic lattice. There you are, I just described a salt crystal in terms of the specification. And you said it couldn't be done !

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I can work out what event occured at teh end, and that's what's important.

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Which means that fully describing the event is NOT important. Thank you for conceding your error.

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But we are not interested at how it grows. It's growth is not a regularity. Regularity is supposed to be a natural law. It's growth is also disputed to be produced by chance, and is therefore a questioned wether it was designed. But not now. Now we are only concerned with the flagellum.

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A regularity is any high-probability event. A new E Coli bacterium growing a flagellum would seem to fit. (What proportion of E Coli bacteria are permanantly without a flagellum or acquire one in some other way ?)Of course if you want to argue that it is a low probability event (which is back to the Intelligent Designer individually assembling flagella) and if observation isn't good enough then you are still going to have to take the growth processes into account.Any way you look at it, simply looking at the structure of the flagellum is wrong. You need to calculate the probabilities of explanations for the event, and you cannot do that by simply looking at the event itself.

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You know very well how it works. Sickle cell. You know very well what it does. Makes red blood cells less efficient at transporting oxygen by deforming them.

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An example is not a definition. Especially when it is a bad example. Sickle-cell is rather odd as beneficial mutations go (even in the environment where it is beneficial, the homozygous states is deleterious).

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No, it's arguing that natural selection is not perfect. There is noise. And this noise interfeeres with the seelction.

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That isn't what it says. It makes no mention of noise or anything interfering with selection.

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Because it's not talking about the gentic meltdown!!!

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I'm glad that you realise your obvious error now.

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It's talking about nearly neutral mutations and how natural selection can't select them out.

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As I've already explained it assumes absolute neutrality. Here it is again: If you understand the quote at all, it is perfectly clear.

A Hindu-Muslim? You are bereft of logic.

Please, everyone, no more accusations of lying. They are personal and off-topic, and they require intimate knowledge of someone else that you are unlikely to have.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Since we know genetic entropy is inevitable and that it hasn't happened yet, then the obvious conclusion is that the 3.5 billion years is incorrect and that the earth is probably young.

This is just one reason why I don't take your world views to seriously. The following is a cut and paste from an article by William Dembski:Nor can design theory strictly speaking be said to be anti-evolutionist. This may sound surprising, especially since design theorists tend to dislike the term "evolution," viewing it as a weasel word that serves more to obfuscate than clarify. The reason design theorists dislike the word is not because they repudiate every possible construal of it, but because they regard it as a Protean term which, much like the process it describes, adapts itself too readily to any situation. Although design theorists regard the word "evolution" as assuming too many distinct meanings that are too easily confused, the notion that organisms have changed over time hardly upsets them. Design theory places no limits on the amount of evolutionary change that organisms might have experienced in the course of natural history. Consistent with classical views of creation, design allows for the abrupt emergence of new forms of life. At the same time design is also consistent with the gradual formation of new forms of life from old.http://www.origins.org/articles/dembski_theologn.html

Creationists would probably be better off abandoning their views in favor of new paradigms. I suggest they interpret Genesis 1 "not" from the paradigm of materialistic thought (a paradigm that interprets it into a linear historical and totally physical framework) but from Einsteinian and non-materialistic quantum physics.Perhaps Genesis 1 is a holographic blueprint expressed in a certain mathematical framework.Day one - light (one dimensional information)Day two - division between dimensions (not just a division of water)Day three - completion of a three dimensional hologram designed for living creaturesDay four - introduction of the dimension of timeDay five - more chaos?I continue to investigate the whole concept and I don't think I would classify this as intelligent design but I don't think we can neatly classify certain things neatly into categories.Edited by traderdrew, : No reason given.Edited by traderdrew, : No reason given.

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How do you know the designer didn't just design the snowflakes to look like they occurred naturally instead of through design?

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We don't. How, do you know that there is no invisible pink unicorn hiding in my bedroom? How do you know there is no flying teapot in Earth's orbit? How do you know there are no monsters right behind you right now? Etc...We don't know. And unless we have any ividene that it is that weay, we do not claim it is that way. Therefore, snowflakes are not designed under that design hypothesis.

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You are inserting an infinitely powerful wizard with unknowable motives and unknowable mechanisms into the equation.

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No, I'm not. You are misinterpreting me.

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There is NO objective way to determine what IS or IS NOT the result of his magic powers.

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Regularity and intermediate probability falsify th design hypothesis.

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A seemingly random clumps of rocks could have been designed to look random.

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Any bedroom could be hiding an invisible pink unicorn too. But do you go around and saying that they are really hidden there, unless you have some evidence first?

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It's IMPOSSIBLE to rule out anything. Especially through experimentation.

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Philosophically yes, scientifically no.

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Present to me an example of a "random hillside" which you can PROVE was NOT designed to be that way by the infinitely powerful, all seeing and undetectable designer.

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You can't. That's because he's UNDETECTABLE and his MOTIVES AND ABILITIES are COMPLETELY UNKNOWABLE.

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You do not understand how science works.First of all science is not about aboslutes. It's not about certainty. You are again confusingphilosophical metaphysics, and science. One deals with absolutes, the other does not. Guess which one does what?As I said, since science does not deal with absolutes, we do not want to prove anything absolutely. And second, we do not prove that something is not. We do not need to go and prove something wrong. I am not supposed to go and inspect a bedroom of a person who claims that there is an invisible pink unicorn there. What he has to do is to provide evidene for what he is claiming is located there.In the same way, if you do not have any evidence a random hill is designed, than untill we have some evidence that it is, we consider the design hypothesis falsified. And we invoke chance and regularity to account for it's surface.Now that's science.

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So, it hasn't happened in 3+ BILLION years.

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It may not even happen in 6 billion years if the conditions are just right, or 10 billion years, so what's your point? Anyway, do you have any evidnece that life exists for 3 billion years already?

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All evidence indicates an INCREASE in complexity.

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Show me one evidence.

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There are NO suitable examples of this claim in reality and you have no means of determining WHEN this alleged entropy will take place.

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When entropy will take place? It's happening right now as we speak every second of our lives.And on the other hand. Here is a great example of constant decrease in complexity. As you can clearly see, during the time of the experiment, a bunch of self replicating RNAs got shorther and shorter. Not longer and longer. So please explain how does this not show genetic entropy? And further more, how have these RNAs have supposed to evolve into full-blown living cells, if they kept getting shorter? Not to mention, that they would have had to evolve into people!Spiegelman's Monster - Wikipedia

Drew, what on Earth are you talking about? Dr A's post was not about "world view". He presented you with a set of facts.The definitions of "creation" and "intelligent design" from Pandas and People are absolutely genuine.The title of Dumbski's book is genuine.The quote from Johnson is genuine. Here's another;

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If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this,...We call our strategy the "wedge".

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Where exactly does the oh-so-biased world-view come into it?You have been presented with a set of facts which clearly demonstrate the religious nature of the ID movement. It has been clearly described as a religious movement by it most prominent advocates, the very people who founded the movement.You have it straight from the horses' mouths. What else it there to say other than to admit that ID is a religious movement?Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

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Well, let us know when your face gets blown off, and we'll come and see why it happened.

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Until then, we know that your claims are refuted both by theory and by observation.

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That's what you say. But than again, what do you know anyway...

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That was funny. So, you don't even know the meaning of the words that you're using.

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"Fitness is not proportionally corelated to biological functions", you say. That is most amusing.

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No, it's not amusing, it's a fact. How many times did I mention sickle cell already? This mutation deforms the red blood cells. Thereby, reducing the amount and effectiveness of a biological function. Which is to transport oxygen to tissue. Yet, in that same time, it increases the fitness because it makes peopple who have this mutations immune to malaria. Thus showing that by reducing some biological functions you can increase fitness. Which means that they are not proportionally correlated.

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But Sanford's bibble about genetic entropy and genetic meltdown involves a reduction in fitness leading to extinction. If you are not being wrong about the same thing as him, why are you clinging to the same terms?

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The fitness may go down. It's not 100% neccessary that it goes down. A mutation can make the fitness and genetic information go down. But it doesn't have to. A mutation can also increase fitness and still decrease genetic information.

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No, I said that you hadn't quantified it.

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Information is quantified by bits. There, i quantified it.

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That's what I'm asking you. As soon as you give me your method for measuring the quantity of "information" in a strand of DNA, I shall prove that your latest blunder is wrong. Until then, your latest blunder is meaningless.

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I've already explained this amyn times. No need to go back to it, please move along to something else.

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In other words only functions that produce a violent and obvious reaction under Axe's working conditions would be noticed.

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Unless you got evidence for it, don't claim that it exists. That's how science works.

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Do you want to take back your definition of specification and try a new one then ?

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Look, the point you keep on missing is that the complexity is the probability of meeting the specification. So your real "specification" is the fabrication derived from the E Coli flagellum - because that is the is the basis of your attempted probability calculation.

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It's not a fabrication becasue we know that the pattern that fits the flagellum, also fits human made artifacts.

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As I told you at the start, not all the terms were defined. (And that would make it somewhat less than the full definition).

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There is nothing else there. I have the book right infront of me. When you get back home, than please do look it up.

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Then direct me to the post where you produced it, because I have not seen anything of the sort. In fact all I have seen is incomplete references to the calculations based on a fabrication - I haven't even seen the results of any calculations using the real specification.

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And again, I will then tell you, that you should produce better numbers than mine. I'm done calcualting for you.

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I see no problem in that approach. If you do not agree, show me your number. And why it's supposed to be better.

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In other words if I do your work for you you MIGHT accept it as right. That's not exactly a generous offer. I've already produced an example demonstrating my point. That should be good enough.

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No, I' not going to accept it as right in any way, unless you explain why my method is wrong. And why your is better.

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Since design does not enter into complexity calculations this is a complete irrelevance. If both fit the specification, both must be considered.

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If they do not fit the complexity, than they shouldn't.

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A salt crystal has the structure of a face-centred cubic lattice. There you are, I just described a salt crystal in terms of the specification. And you said it couldn't be done !

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Wrong. Elementary mistake. Look up at what the TDI says! You ahve to be able to describe the salt crystal without recurse at the event. Which means, that you can't say that the salt crystal looks like "face-centred cubic lattice". Because you have just made a recurse to the event you are trying to describe in the first place! You mentioned the salt crystal, you can't do that.

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Which means that fully describing the event is NOT important. Thank you for conceding your error.

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The event is the flagellum. That's what's important.

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A regularity is any high-probability event. A new E Coli bacterium growing a flagellum would seem to fit. (What proportion of E Coli bacteria are permanantly without a flagellum or acquire one in some other way ?)

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No, that's would only apply to laws. The growth mechanism itself is in question of being designed. So you can't say flagellu grows by regularity, since regualrity only means natural laws. If it didn't mean that, than the functioning of the flagellum is also very probable, and could be said to be working according to a regularity. But obviously, that's wrong.

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Of course if you want to argue that it is a low probability event (which is back to the Intelligent Designer individually assembling flagella) and if observation isn't good enough then you are still going to have to take the growth processes into account.

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I'm going to take it into account when I will want to know if it was designed or not. Now I do not wan't to know that. I'm only concerned with the flagellum.

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Any way you look at it, simply looking at the structure of the flagellum is wrong. You need to calculate the probabilities of explanations for the event, and you cannot do that by simply looking at the event itself.

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But we are not trying to accoun for it's growth, but for it's existance in general.

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An example is not a definition. Especially when it is a bad example. Sickle-cell is rather odd as beneficial mutations go (even in the environment where it is beneficial, the homozygous states is deleterious).

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No it's not odd. You think that's the only example!? Really!?Did you know there are people resistant to HIV? Yup! It's true. And guess what? Obviously, that's a beneficial mutation, right! But the best part is, it's reduces the amount of genetic information, by a deletion, thus making the receptor that HIV uses to enter the cell, inactive! Therefore, it's increaseing the genetic entropy, yet it's a beneficial mutation!The same thing as sickle cell. I told you that beneficial mutations also cause genetic entropy by degrading biological functions, yet you didn't want to believe it, well now you have it. Enjoy.

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While CCR5 has multiple variants in its coding region, the deletion of a 32-bp segment results in a nonfunctional receptor, thus preventing HIV R5 entry; two copies of this allele provide strong protection against HIV infection

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CCR5 - Wikipedia

So if point mutation 1 decreases genetic information, what happens with point mutation 2, the inverse of point mutation 1?

Those pushing their various religious beliefs in the guise of science (e.g., those pushing creation "science" and ID) should take your words to heart.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

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Unless you got evidence for it, don't claim that it exists. That's how science works.

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I didn't claim that anything existed. I pointed out that YOU didn't have the evidence to back up YOUR claim.

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It's not a fabrication becasue we know that the pattern that fits the flagellum, also fits human made artifacts.

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Humans make things out of the 50 proteins used in the E Coli flagellum (or variants within 20% difference) ?Or is it that you still utterly fail to understand Dembski's method despite my repeated explanations ?

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There is nothing else there. I have the book right infront of me. When you get back home, than please do look it up.

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I got back today and I have just done so. There is a list of 8 terms and their definitions at the bottom of p144. Exactly what I said was needed. I can only suppose that your copy is defective, with a blank page 144, otherwise you could have found it by simply glancing to the left.

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And again, I will then tell you, that you should produce better numbers than mine. I'm done calcualting for you.

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I've already advised you not to bother because the calculation is irrelevant anyway. And it certainly isn't my job to help you, by doing your work for you.

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No, I' not going to accept it as right in any way, unless you explain why my method is wrong. And why your is better.

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I've already done all that, and your only response is to demand that I do the work for you. Well it's not my problem if your calculations are mistaken and useless. It only undermines your case.

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If they do not fit the complexity, than they shouldn't.

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That is not even meaningful. Since you need to consider them all to produce a SINGLE valid complexity figure using the only valid specification you have offered (instead of the fabrication you actually tried to use) there is no question of them fitting or not fitting "the complexity".
Let me repeat again: the complexity is the probability of an event matching the specification without design, considering all possible explanations.

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Wrong. Elementary mistake. Look up at what the TDI says! You ahve to be able to describe the salt crystal without recurse at the event. Which means, that you can't say that the salt crystal looks like "face-centred cubic lattice". Because you have just made a recurse to the event you are trying to describe in the first place! You mentioned the salt crystal, you can't do that.

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If you read TDI you would find out that you are completely wrong, as I have already explained. There is nothing wrong with deriving the original pattern from the event (as indeed you have done) so long as it can be reasonably derived without reference to the event (TRACT). And a simple geometric structure, such as a face-centred cubic lattice obviously can be derived without reference to the event.

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No, that's would only apply to laws.

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You are wrong, as usual. All high probability events are classified as being due to regularities. Just check TDI.

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The growth mechanism itself is in question of being designed. So you can't say flagellu grows by regularity, since regualrity only means natural laws. If it didn't mean that, than the functioning of the flagellum is also very probable, and could be said to be working according to a regularity. But obviously, that's wrong.

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You're wrong about the definition of regularity and the rest of your argument is a confused mess, too. It's really very simple. If you don't want to consider the origins of the growth mechanisms then you just have to accept that they exist. If you want to say that THEY are designed then you need to apply Dembski's method to them. (And what if they are not ?)

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I'm going to take it into account when I will want to know if it was designed or not. Now I do not wan't to know that. I'm only concerned with the flagellum.

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Then you're stuck with the flagellum being a high probability event, and therefore attributed to regularity.

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But we are not trying to accoun for it's growth, but for it's existance in general.

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The immediate origin is the growth mechanisms. Any account more basic than that will be an account of those mechanisms.

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No it's not odd. You think that's the only example!? Really!?

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Well it IS odd as an example of a beneficial mutation because it can't ever be fixed in a population. And no, I don't think that you can't find a few other examples nor did I suggest that it would be impossible. What I pointed out is that examples are not definitions.