Biological Evidence Against Intelligent Design

Hi, Greyseal. I think the whole point of RAZD's argument is that Occam's Razor, by itself, is not evidence of anything: it's just our means of drawing conclusions when we have no evidence.The thread is about finding evidence that refutes ID, and RAZD is saying that this can't be done. If ID is untestable, then it is untestable, and the conclusion of this thread should rightly be that there is no biological evidence against Intelligent Design.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi RAZD Being Devil's Advocate is fine, really. I somewhat agree with you, unfortunately it means that we not only have to be able to cross universes, but that we specifically have to find one that DOES have a deity as well as one that specifically DOES NOT have a deity.Since that's quite a tall order, I think we're justified in using rational and logical processes to get the best answers possible in the situation we have, which is admittedly a sample set of 1.Or do you not agree?Isn't that nihilism, that we can't truly know anything for sure? Or something? I'm not a philosopher, but I digress, it's somewhat off topic. In other words make an unfounded assumption and then base our straw man argument on that?No it doesn't belong in the quote, I put that there - you're making an assumption a priori and apparently saying that because your idea can't be disproven (when you've stated that it is disprovable) that it must be true.If that's not what you're saying, please correct me.It's not that I don't agree it could be true, but you have said yourself that your idea posits a designer that has used evolution as it appears to work, and has set up the world as it appears to be, in such a way that it is impossible to tell if there was a designer (there's certainly no "made in paradise" labels or ©god stamps).I don't think it's justifiable to say "because you can't disprove it, it must exist" - simple parsimony defeats such circular reasoning.If you think I don't agree that you could be right, then allow me to say that yes, you could be correct, but I also think it's entirely fruitless to persue an avenue of thought where every single fact and observation that has not only been made but can ever be made fits with your viewpoint?It's not scientific, it's philosophical. The only thing that could disprove your theory is to discover that we DO have a god (a designer) that didn't intend to use evolution the way it has apparently "been used". No, I disagree because it gives us no results whatsoever. I thought that was obvious. so your argument goes like this:designer --> universe --> earth --> abiogenesis --> evolution --> usand the FACTS sayuniverse --> earth --> abiogenesis --> evolution --> uswhy are YOU inserting something you have no proof FOR?I could imagine all number of things that fulfill your premise - must I fill up my head with phantasms that in no way aid investigation into the facts, to produce a "proper" answer?See, I'm not throwing out anything, but you're making shit up.EDIT: I've thought about this a bit, and I think this example may help clarify things a bit:Take the face on Mars:-*) at this point in time, since we cannot actually go there in person and make sure, we have seen either an example of pareidolia OR an actual face, correct?*) It is not absolutely clear whether or not the "face" was Designed or not, correct?*) It is obviously possible that very intelligent aliens could have made the face - AND made it so fundamentally indistinct that it only appears to be a face from certain angles, such that we may NEVER be sure, even after physically going there and ascertaining whether there is evidence of tool-use and other irregularities that we *currently* catalogue as being designed (a'la ancient flint tools)Now, given these facts - and I think you'll have to agree with me on them - would you see a point in demanding that people believe that aliens made a face that is, to all intents and purposes (including within the "aliens did it!" theory), mere pareidolia?Would you demand that these aliens be investigated?What would you investigate, and what would your findings show?Would continued non-proof of the design of the rock structure such that, under certain lighting conditions it looks somewhat like a face, prove aliens DID exist or DID NOT exist, or that you CAN'T TELL? And would this answer be useful to anyone, anywhere, ever?Edited by greyseal, : rock face on mars question - yes, seriously

My objection is that he's making shit up rather than looking at how things are and how they appear to work, he is saying "oh, that's perfectly capable of being done by a supreme deity" - which leads us precisely nowhere And my question is "what ID are we looking at" ? Because quite rightly, since the ID he posits is unfalsifiable, such a thing leads to the conclusion that we cannot disprove it - but it's circular and pointless and I don't think it has any validity. It uses no facts, proves nothing and disproves nothing. there is no evidence against it because there is no evidence FOR it.If, on the other hand, the ID we're looking at is the ID we see fundies trying to push into schools, that's something which can actually be discussed meaningfully.My question therefore is "do you really want to put ID up on a pedastal and claim victory over something which is useless" ?Don't get me wrong, RAZD's version of ID is useless. It has no predictive power, it teaches nothing, it needs nothing, it is a perfect tautology. It has no evidence either for or against.The fact that we can't prove the Earth was here for us even can't be used against it, nor that dinosaurs came first and were wiped out - "oh" says our resident zen deist, "that was obviously the way it must have been done because that's the way it happened", and that's what he can say about EVERYTHING that ever was, is OR WILL BE.

I don't think the guys you're quoting (not all of them at least) would call what they're talking about "ID" - although I haven't read enough to know for sure.One question though - is panspermia "Intelligent Design"?I thought that "design" implies intent - as in the OUTCOME is important (i.e. the designer would be aiming specifically for homo sapiens rather than just spreading life). Panspermia as it appears to be described requires no intelligence, and does not include any design.

Right, don't misunderstand the argument. Genuine panspermia theory, pre-biotic molecules or even simple lifeforms arriving on chunks of meterorite or comet-tail and kicking things off, is definitely not intelligent design. But directed panspermia, the idea of life being sent here to seed the planet for some reason, in much the way that we might someday wish to seed other planets like Mars, would be intelligent design. This is the substance of the "it might be an alien" distraction tossed out glibly by the Discovery people, and I am ready to agree now that we ought to start holding them accountable for it. What Hoyle and Crick and their collaborators, and others being quote-mined by the IDers, are talking about is definitely not the deceptively-packaged cDesign proponentsism its being used to support. But I don't care anymore. If they are going to reference Hoyle's ideas about the anthropic principle and evolutionary improbability, then they are going to have to stand up to the scrutiny that his wacky theory about the earth being seeded with viruses by extradimensional entities properly deserves.To touch the topic properly again, biological evidence against intelligent design isn't Wow look, they are really just secretly ignorant bible-belters. It's Ok, if the earth were seeded by aliens or something, what sort of evidence would there be?RAZD's argument starts becoming important from this view. If they are using evolutionary design methods to accomplish something, what is that thing? And what does it tell us about them? If it's walking, standing upright, well, to start with, they are incompetent. If it is intelligence, though, and standing and walking are just adjuncts to that, well, still, the intelligence is severely clouded by other things. More likely its just an adjunct too.What is it we are good at? Better than the other animals. They don't have much memory, and virtually no concept of the future. Nor do they have much ingenuity. They live their lives, do their thing, don't worry or plot or contrive in any way. We, on the other hand, oh us.Are we made to suffer? Is that what we are good for? What value is our complex and continuous and everpresent and highly abstracted pain and misery to our galactic overlords? What sort of "god" needs a Scapegoat?

I wouldn't call directed panspermia "intelligent design" either - this time the intelligent bit is right, but I wouldn't call "chucking this stuff at that planet" as "design" unless, after the seeding there were various episodes of interference to produce a specific outcome (for instance, one could theorize that the earth was protected enough to let life develop, but that the dinosaurs were seen as not the right stuff and as such were wiped out - but the resultant mammal population once more protected.Presumably evidence of breeding intelligence (black monoliths for example) were removed once they'd done their job - or at least are so well hidden that we haven't found any. It's a valid and interesting theory, but it still remains essentially unprovable in and of itself unless "mistakes" or evidence one way or the other can be found.As you say, if they wanted "walking and standing upright" then their design is suboptimal for that task - I'd call it evidence against design rather than evidence against intelligence, as I wouldn't label "disinterested but directed panspermia using natural evolution" as "design" and certainly wouldn't call it "Intelligent Design" because "ID" is decidedly judeo-christian in origin and posits a yahweh designer who doesn't work that way at all.In many ways I wish the fundies WOULD see ID as the way you and RAZD put it - whilst offering nothing in itself, it poses various questions that CAN be used to discover facts and infer truths about ourselves - for instance it would seem possible that what we call the chemistry of life may not be entirely "native" to this planet, and I would assume that this theory can be tested - do we find precurors to life out there in comets and interstellar debris? Can we rule out this occuring naturally?

Yep, you are getting the gist of it now. There is some real science to be found in this idea, and we should get at it and argue it and show it for what it is. Bingo! If it really "could be an alien" then this is the sort of thing it would have to be doing. Here, look at this, this is Behe from the Dover trial again Kitzmiller v. Dover: Day 10, AM: Michael Behe (continued)You see? He's saying it's science. He's claiming it has explanatory power for the complexities in structure, and particularly for the exact complexities which make one species different from another. Yes?Now, if this is science, if it really could be an alien, then there has to be a methodology for those complexities and differences to be introduced. Here is Hoyle's partner Chandra Wickramasinghe testifying in Arkansas in 1981 as to just such a methodology Chandra Wickramasinghe's Testimony in Arkansas, 1981If it's science, that's the science that it is. The people who come in here week in and week out claiming that they are going to prove ID is more scientific than evolution and then just point at things they don't understand about evolution instead, this is the science they are supposed to be doing, but they don't know how. They don't know how because the Discovery Institute pawns don't actually do any such science. They can't, their parishioners would kill them.Now, what I'm hoping toward is, what I'm asking for from Percy and anyone else who might have an idea, is, some people alive now who might actually be doing such science and have need for public attention and potential funding. I want us to give them that attention, I want them to move to the center of the ID argument. If ID is science, then I want to talk to some scientists, not these theologians in brown wrappers we keep getting.I want a public discussion of the evidence and implications for the idea that we have been bred and manipulated by some sort of alien beings for some purpose we never were consulted in. I want everyone who thinks about ID thinking about that. And while they are thinking about it, I want them to also be thinking about what it could mean if there were people on earth, well-endowed influential political groups, who were telling us that that was Ok and we should just cooperate with our alien masters because that's our purpose in the world. The Visitors are NOT our friends!And I want Dembski and Meyer and people like that to get full credit for bringing this important scientific paradigm out into the open where it can be made the centerpiece of "teaching the controversy". Why do I want that? Above and beyond any incidental science such as a better understanding of panspermia like you mention? Because I want their parishioners to kill them.. . . No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.-- Wells

oh I'm very much with you - I just see RAZD's definition as being such a tautology as to be a dead idea.I wish the fundies who think ID so wonderful would do their work as if it were the science they ape - it would a perfect example I would drag into every single school everywhere of how you DON'T do science.I'd have a nice list - all the mistakes, tautologies, errors, omissions and tainted data that these ID clowns come up with - and I'd teach the next generation of real scientists to not only avoid these same mistakes but to recognize them for what they are.

Hi, Greyseal. I understand perfectly. And, I agree with you. And that's why I agree with him that this thread's central concept is invalid on its face.----- You can't force IDists to have a falsifiable theory, and, if they don't have one, then we just can't use an empirical, scientific approach to disprove it. Yeah, it's frustrating; but those are the breaks.Our only recourse is to either focus only on the positive evidence for evolution, for abiogenesis, etc.; or restrict our arguments to specific ID models that are falsifiable (e.g., irreducible complexity, biblical "kinds," genetic entropy, the Flood, etc). I would be a proponent of this approach.Otherwise, all we'll get from this thread is unjustifiable confidence in what amounts to an argument from incredulity, and the hollow satisfaction of beating up on strawmen.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Can I ask a question of you and/or RAZD?Is RAZD's hypothetical ID (which I have no other label for despite it's differences with "mainstream" ID) just a hypothetical creation, or is he actually suggesting it as a valid hypothesis? Well there's the rub - the ID that creationists have come up with IS falsifiable. It starts off with "there's a designer, and he's intelligent" and...does apparently nothing but deal out arguments from ignorance and incredulity and totally miss out the fact that the fact we've had the dinosaurs and they got wiped out, men have nipples, alligator blood is better than human and so on, would seem to indicate that the designer either doesn't actually DESIGN so much as "let run amok". In which case the designer hasn't actually designed in the manner they suggest - they say "what if you came upon this {insert man-made object here} on a beach" and then conclude that because they can't understand how {insert incredulity about biological feature} is "complex" (which they never define) that "it must be design" (which sounds like the blueprints-and-scaled-model idea.They specifically speak out AGAINST evolution, when we can see shared genes, ERV's, morphological similarities and much more that proves beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt that evolution really has occured.If they speak FOR blueprints-and-scaled-models and AGAINST evolution, then the facts of life falsify everything they stand for at this time.A proper theory of ID - similar to what RAZD is suggesting, would look a hell of a lot like evolution with special pleading that {certain unnamed special occurences} have to have been "designed" (or made to happen with intent) - which I agree, the parishers would absolutely murder them for it, and sounds a lot like E.T phoned it in...

Hi, Greyseal. Well, it's essentially Deism, and it's thematically similar to Old Earth Creationism. There are IDists who accept the general principles of evolution, but not Abiogenesis. And, some well-known IDists follow similar models: Behe, for example, accepts evolution, but includes the occasional input from a Designer as a requirement.----- Which one? There is no central model of ID that can simply be assumed when you mention the name! Creationists have come up with many variants of ID, and, when you just say, "ID," every one of them is going to think you're talking about something different.Unless you specify which particular branch of the movement you're talking about, there will always be a subgroup that can withstand your criticism. Most branches can be falsified by specific arguments, but none of the specific arguments work against the gestalt.----- None of these things is evidence against a Designer, though.Even created things can be killed; and things that can be killed can go extinct.Men may have nipples because it was easier, more efficient and more sensible to design one process of embryogenesis for both sexes than to make two different ones.I've never heard of alligator blood being better than human blood, and don't see how that would go against ID anyway: birds fly a lot better than we do, fish swim a lot better than we do, bees sting a lot better than we do, mushrooms digests cellulose than we do, polar bears survive cold temperatures better than we do, and alfalfa grows back after severe injuries better than we do. What does any of that prove?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Then why stop at evolution? Why not intelligent falling?Intelligent falling appears to follow Einsteins equations, but why couldn't an intelligence use Einstein's equations when causing things to fall?We could do the same for intelligent flying where an intelligence keeps airplanes aloft using the same laws of aerodynamics that us human designers use.We could do the same for intelligent chemistry where the intelligence uses Pauli's exclusion principles when designing chemical reactions.We could inject an intelligence in every single occurence in the universe with the explanation that the intelligence merely follows the laws of the universe.What it results in is a useless appendage, an added entity put there for pure speculation or for emotional comfort.To make things even worse, this isn't even close to the type of ID put forward by those who support ID as a science. The way in which design is detected is by finding things that nature could not produce, things that go against the regular process of the mindless laws of the universe. Flagella are evidence of design because evolution could not produce it. Gonzalez describes the Earth as a planet that nature could not produce by itself.

How about this. The fact that the universe is poorly designed for Jovians is evidence that there is no intelligent designer.If we can arbitrarily decide that humans are the goal of ID, why not assume that the goal should be intelligent lifeforms on Neptune? In this case, gravity and the nuclear forces should have been designed differently to allow enough energy to reach Jupiter but without the crushing force of so much gravity. Given that these parameters don't exist obviously points to the lack of a designer, right?

Hi, Taq. RAZD's scenario has the Designer setting the equations beforehand, then letting it go. So, in RAZD's scenario, gravity is gravity. Intelligent falling is hilarious, but it's not the same as what RAZD is suggesting.----- But, IDists don't believe that everything goes against the regular process of the mindless laws of the universe, so no amount of evidence of things following the regular process of the mindless laws of nature is going to disprove ID.----- Good point there. But, Occam's Razor is still not evidence.Since that's the only thing we have, I guess it makes sense for you to want to go back to making jokes and beating up on strawmen instead.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi greyseal.I'd like to thank Bluejay for covering the basic points. Nice to see someone get it. Being agnostic on this issue is not making an unfounded assumption - it is saying that neither side has proven their case, and thus we cannot exclude one to the benefit of the other. No, the point is that because you can't disprove it, you can't assume it is false. Simple logic dictates that non-invalidated possibilities need to be considered in any complete evaluation. (?) --> universe --> earth --> abiogenesis (?) --> evolution --> usLet's be honest eh?Enjoy.

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