What exactly is ID?

Just as a side note, Shannon information is not a measure of complexity. I understand exactly what you mean, and other people have already addressed it, so I didn't bother making the point again, but it would probably help make my position more clear to you by telling you that the sharpshooter analogy is precisely the error you're committing. You're drawing a false analogy between on the one hand looking up a specific phone number for a movie theater (the target), and on the other (allow me to choose an example) a protein essential for life in some organism, and you then conclude that the protein must have been targeted, too.That's the sharpshooter analogy. You're looking at a protein and, in essence, drawing a target around it as if it were the actual intentional goal of some intelligent being. You think the mere existence of the essential protein is proof that such an intelligent being must exist and must have carried out actions that resulted in the design of the protein and the insertion of the required DNA into the organism's population.It is the nature of human beings to find purpose and meaning in existence, and IDists making this mistake when they think they're doing science is just human nature. People do the same thing throughout the natural world, not just in biology. For example, that Earth's orbit is in just the right place neither too close nor too far from the sun and with a minimal ellipticity is cited by some as evidence of God's handiwork.But you can keep going, and some people do. The presence of the ozone layer protecting us from ultraviolet rays could be God's handiwork. The presence of the Earth's magnetic field protecting us from most cosmic rays could be evidence of God's handiwork. That it rains to water our crops could be evidence of God's handiwork. That you're warm and comfortable in your home could be evidence of God's handiwork.And they're right, yes it could be evidence of God's handiwork (or intelligent designer, if you prefer), but if you're doing science then you have to develop evidence that that's what happened. You're not going to get anywhere with mistakes like the sharpshooter fallacy. You have to come up with actual evidence. Evolutionary mechanisms explain the distribution and diversity of life around us now and in the past, and if it wasn't evolutionary mechanisms but something else then you need evidence of those other mechanisms. For instance, find something in some species' genome somewhere that couldn't possibly be part of any nested hierarchy. Find evidence of the mechanisms used by intelligent designers to effect change in genomes of the populations of living organisms.--Percy

Boy are you confused! Paragraph 1 stated what the argument from authority actually is: Paragraph 2 stated what it definitely is not: It was paragraphs 1 and 2 that gave the right and wrong definitions of the argument from authority. Paragraph 3 was a concluding statement emphasizing the point made in paragraph 2. So when you say: That's because they were stating the exact same thing, just in different terms.--Percy

An odd question in a thread asking what ID is, but briefly, because reproduction is imperfect change is inevitable. Almost every reproductive event includes at least one mutation. Mutations are the ultimate source of variation. As soon as there are differences then there will be differential reproductive success. Life will produce more of whatever variations are most successful - in fact, that's the definition of success, contributing more offspring to the next generation. We call this process that results in getting more of whatever variations produce the most offspring competition.--Percy

Hi Brad,You're changing horses in mid-ride. First you argued that biological structures like proteins are like a phone number that has been specifically chosen, leading to the conclusion that an intelligent being must have intentionally designed and constructed the protein and inserted it into the genome of the population. Now you're arguing that mutation and natural selection are insufficient for producing biological structures like proteins, leading to the conclusion that an intelligent being must have intentionally designed and constructed the protein and inserted it into the genome of the population.But both arguments are wrong. The first is the sharpshooter fallacy. You responded as if you were uncertain what it was, as if I were the first to mention it, but Iblis and Taq had already pointed this out to you. Choosing a protein and labeling it intentionally designed is analogous to shooting at the broad side of a barn then painting a bullseye where the bullet hit. Your "granny" explanation makes clear that you understand the sharpshooter fallacy, and if you think there are incredibly unlikely events in the protein's past that make the very fact that it exists unlikely in the extreme and point to intention and purpose, then you have to find evidence of those unlikely events. Without evidence for why the place where you painted the target is an inevitable consequence of past events, we can only conclude that you painted it where you did because that's where the bullet hit.Your second argument, that mutations and natural selection are insufficient to produce proteins for specific purposes, is just an unsupported assertion. Each generation in a population possesses a large number of new mutations. The worst mutations don't make it to the following generation. The best mutations become fixed within the population. Then the process repeats again in the next generation. By discarding the worst mutations and producing more copies of the best, evolution allows populations to improve their adaptation to their environment. If you think evolutionary change can only produce diminishing adaptation then all you need is evidence of this occurring.Fallacies, misapprehensions about evolution, rhetorical arguments, lack of evidence. That's what you got.--Percy

Hi Brad,You'd have no trouble convincing anyone that the decapitation you described or bullets in the outline of grandma's body were not natural. If your evidence for ID is equally obvious then let's hear it.What you've got is a claim that things like proteins could not have come about naturally but must have been created on purpose. You're painting a target around these things and claiming that they must have been what some intelligence intended to create. But unlike your decapitation or grandma's outline, not only do you have no evidence, we already know a great deal about the natural processes that create things like proteins.That's why you keep getting asked for your evidence. You'll know you have something when you're not forced to argue with analogies like decapitations and grandma's outline but instead can respond with actual evidence.The answer to the question, "What exactly is ID?" is that ID is a hypothesis that life may not have come about naturally.The answer to the question, "What is the evidence for ID?" is that life is intricate and complex and for that reason looks designed to some people.And that's about all you got.--Percy

Things that happen in the natural world leave evidence behind. Things that are made up like fantasy and magic do not leave evidence behind.So unless your theory of ID is fantasy or magic, however it happened must have left evidence behind. That's all Taq is saying, that if life today is the product of some intelligence then that intelligence should have left evidence behind of how it created life.One thing's for sure. The only intelligent designer we know of, namely us, the watchmakers of Paley fame, does not create designs in a nested hierarchy.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Fix pronoun.

Is this why you accept ID? Because you think we not only don't know how proteins are produced in nature, but we can't even conceive how such a process could occur naturally?I understand you aren't referring to how proteins are produced in the cell. Naturally we know how that happens because we've looked in cells and seen it happening. That's the whole process of DNA to RNA to ribosomes that join amino acids together to form proteins.What you're actually referring to is how new or different proteins are made, and we know how that happens, too. The DNA copying that takes place during reproduction is imperfect, and when you change the DNA template for a protein, the protein may change, too. What you're doing is postulating a mechanism that has never been seen to occur and for which there is no evidence, and you want it to be taken seriously over a mechanism which we actually observe taking place. Good luck with that. If you had evidence for ID you'd be talking about the evidence for ID. Instead you talk about anything but. Not satisfied with being wrong once in a single short paragraph, you've decided to be wrong twice. Briefly, since this is off-topic, the Miller experiment is still considered preeminent in origin of life circles because it was the first laboratory demonstration that organic molecules (amino acids, as it happens, not proteins) could be produced by natural processes. If you want to respond about this experiment then please post over at The Miller-Urey experiments.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

You've already been shown wrong on this point. Why are you insisting on continuing to be wrong? Keeping this at the same oversimplified level of detail that you just presented (e.g., "a whole lot of adding of info"), the human genome has around 3 billion base pairs. Life has existed on Earth for at least 3 billion years. That would require adding only a single base/pair per year. Doesn't sound so impossible now, does it? Of course, that's way oversimplified, but you started it, and we can get into as much detail as you like, just as soon as you quantify how much "a whole lot of info" is.We keep requesting evidence from you, and all we get is rhetorical answers based on faulty intuition that in turn derives from knowing too little about your subject because your information comes from sources who either also know little or who have an agenda of making sure you don't learn too much so that you'll accept the crap they feed you.Incredible as it might seem to you, reaching correct conclusions depends upon having correct facts, and so far you don't have many. If you want to continue to be wrong about the Urey-Miller experiment and subsequent origins of life research, could you at least do so where it would be on-topic over at the The Miller-Urey experiments thread? Thanks.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Since this thread is about developing a clear picture of what ID is, why don't you tell us how ID explains the recorded history of change over time that you allude to here.--Percy

Boy, when you decide to be wrong you really do it in style. First, it's "asexual", not "A sexual". Second, there are far more bacterial cells in the human body than human cells, especially in the human gut, and without them you couldn't digest your food, so they have a great deal to do with us. Third, bacterial cells use the same DNA structure, nucleotides and amino acids as all other cell types on the planet.So much for your "little to nothing in common with the rest of the living world."Anyway, what you're saying here is that you agree that bacteria have been demonstrated to experience positive mutations, but that what we find true for bacteria doesn't necessarily hold true for other types of cells. I'd ask why you think this is true, except I know you're just making things up as you go along. If that's not true then why don't you surprise us and finally support something you say with actual evidence. This thread is about defining ID. Does ID believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old? If so, then of course it's on topic. It sounds to me like you're confusing ID and young Earth creationism, but if you want to claim that ID believes the Earth is young then go ahead. Why break your streak of wrong statements now? By the way, Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, a founding member of the ID movement, and one of ID's most prominent proponents, believes the Earth is billions of years old. Don't apologize for not making things more complicated than they need to be. There are already too many people writing long essays. My criticism wasn't that you had insufficient detail but insufficient evidence. I understand what you believe perfectly, but there seems to be no factual underpinning for your beliefs, or at least none that you're sharing with us.In contrast to the way your post opened, the remainder was a sincere and largely successful effort on your part to clearly communicate your understanding of one of the primary problems with evolution, so I'm going to address that now.It is clear that you understand that each offspring represents an experiment, and so all around the Earth there are literally (if we include bacteria) billions and trillions of experiments daily. The offspring go off to make their way in the world, each with its own mix of alleles (sexual reproduction) and mutations, and each is able to produce its own offspring proportionate to its ability to compete successfully in its environment for such things as food and, with sexual reproduction, access to mates.Where you go wrong is in believing that the impact of the environment on life represents a plan. Nature has no plan. If the environment turns colder then life with characteristics more suitable to the cold will out-reproduce life that does not possess such characteristics. Life with better cold adaptations will replace life that doesn't have such adaptations. Mutations and allele combinations that favor survival in the cold will become more common. The genome of populations in this colder world will become different from before the environmental change.About your coin flipping analogy, notice that at no point in the evolutionary process is there anything unlikely going on. Your coin flipping analogy has nothing to do with evolution. In each generation the better adapted contribute more successfully to the next generation than those less well adapted, and so the genes of the better adapted will always be better represented in a population. As environments warm and cool and dry and hydrate and change elevation (even to below sea level) population genomes are forced to accommodate or go extinct.I suppose one could euphemistically say that nature, in your words, "holds on to the changes it likes," but the impersonal impact of environment on life is not a plan. Where you went wrong was in taking a characteristic of your analogy and assuming that it is possessed by nature. The writer of your novel provides the selection mechanism in your analogy, and the writer uses his intelligence in making his selections. You're drawing an analogy between the selection performed by the intelligent writer and selection in nature, and then you're concluding that because the writer is intelligent that nature must also be intelligent.What you're doing is overextending your analogy. As an illustration of selection it works fine, but just because the type of selection performed by the writer requires intelligence doesn't mean that the type of selection performed by nature requires intelligence. That the mechanism of selection in your analogy has intelligence was a choice you made when you composed your analogy and has nothing to do with nature. If the writer decided to select for changes that were more representative of conservative political beliefs would that mean nature is also conservative? No, of course not, it's irrelevant. If you wanted a gerbil to give birth to a kangaroo then I agree it would be as unlikely as you say, but that's not the way evolution works. Evolution is the accumulation of tiny, minute changes over generations, so sudden changes of this magnitude in a single generation simply do not happen.I know your writer analogy of single letter changes convinces you that tiny changes cannot accumulate into positive changes, but think about it for a while and you realize that in nature nothing else could possibly happen. Changes toward worse adaptation will be less likely to make it to the next generation. While presenting your writer analogy you seem to have forgotten your earlier acknowledgement that there are actually millions and billions of writers selecting from single letter changes in their books, and that only the better "adapted" books in each generation go forward to contribute to the next generation.AbE: I guess I should make an effort to more directly address the topic. This thread isn't about evolution. It's about how IDists define ID. How does ID explain the fossil record of change over time?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Add closing attempt to get on topic.

Hi Brad,I'm not trying to make you look foolish. You don't need my help in doing that. I've only been pointing out where you're wrong, perhaps in increasingly ostentatious fashion as it's become apparent that you don't care much about getting things right.In this case you said that bacteria "bear little to nothing in common with the rest of the living world around us." That's wrong. Dead wrong. Replying with a message that manages to make a few correct statements doesn't make your error correct. Congratulations, but those messages weren't addressed to me. Your replies to me have been remarkably evidence free. I don't want to discuss the age of the Earth. You said that "there would need to be a whole lot of adding of info taking place in evolution to go from a single celled organism to multi-celled complex organisms that can build condominiums." What this is saying that ID believes there's too much information in our genome for it to have happened naturally.So I replied that if it took 3 billion years to add all that info then that's a very tiny rate of adding information, one base pair per year, and you responded about the age of the Earth. So is that why ID thinks there's too much information in our genome to have occurred naturally, because the Earth is too young and there wasn't enough time?It's not, is it.So let's skip the part where you try to explain how what you said made perfect sense in an ID context. Let's instead just go to the part where you explain why ID believes there's too much information in our genome for it to have occurred naturally.You didn't comment on the other portions of my reply. Do you now understand what was wrong with your coin flip and writer analogies?And again trying to bring this discussion back to the topic, what is the ID explanation for the evidence we have of life's history on earth, such as the genetic and fossil records? How does ID think this all happened? What does this evidence tell us about the design principles that the designer employed? What can we ferret out about the mechanisms the designer employed to modify genomes? Did the designer introduce change and innovation at species level, or at the genus level, or at a higher level, or did it vary? Why did the designer create in a nested hierarchy? What are the ID answers to these questions? In other words, what is ID?--Percy

Just to clarify, Brad was engaging in a bit of revisionism. What he had said was that bacteria "bear little to nothing in common with the rest of the living world around us."I told him that was wrong and he responded with a message making it seem like I had claimed that bacteria and eukaryotes are very similar. The only point I was making to him is that bacteria have much in common with the rest of life.--Percy

Hi Taq,Your comments about similarity versus dissimilarity were right on the money, but what Brad said that I was responding to was "little to nothing in common" without qualification. Brad was making it seem like we were having a difference of opinion about how similar bacteria are to eukaryotes. What really happened is that Brad said that bacteria have little to nothing in common with the rest of life and I told him that, once again, he was wrong.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Make quote more complete.

But if ID is nothing more than design detection then it has no explanatory power. How can it replace evolution if it can't explain everything that evolution already explains? It would be like trying to replace your automobile with a bicycle.But okay, if that's what ID actually is, design detection, then I guess the question asked by this long thread has finally been answered. Now if only ID could actually *do* design detection.--Percy

Has it ever even been used on the flagellum? I've never seen ID's method of design detection applied to anything. The bacterial flagellum, blood clotting and the eye, among others, have been offered as examples of design, but I've never seen any actual design detection technique applied.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.