Biological Evidence Against Intelligent Design

Consider the humble tapeworm. Perhaps the best example of irreducible complexity at the organism level, it's little more than a motile digestive system with reproductive capabilities. It's one of the most efficient creatures in existence, and could not lose any aspect of its simple structure without going extinct. If anything was designed for a single purpose, it is this guy.And what is that purpose? To make us miserable, to shorten our lives, to prey on our weak, to cause the poor to starve even in times of plenty. Thanks a lot, Intelligent Designer.If God made all the "blessings" like standing upright and making babies and having a big head, who produced all the curses like tapeworm, Ebola, and chiggers? And why are they so much better designed?* credit JBS Haldane for the base argument

Who would you recommend as representing such a theory? I've been reading Hoyle and Crick pretty heavily since last night when I discovered some wild quotes from them in a tabloid review, they both seem to have arrived at a view of the data that might seem disturbed, like something out of Lovecraft. Hoyle is worse, here's an example Fred Hoyle - WikipediaCrick went pretty hard toward directed panspermia as well. Francis Crick - WikipediaBut it's Hoyle who really makes for interesting reading I think Fred Hoyle - WikipediaThese guys are gone though. Who is working now who talks like this, instead of the way people like Dembski scurry around between the lines in Genesis? Page not found – New Dawn: The World's Most Unusual Magazine

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?

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

Let's discuss this in more depth. We can tell these antenna structures aren't natural because of the way they are constructed. The fact that their design was trial-and-error doesn't prevent that. What level of technology do we have to get to, where we can no longer tell so easily? What methods might we use then?When humans create a liposome or a PNA chain for some specific purpose, it might look natural at first glance. But I think we can tell the difference when we start looking at functionality and purpose and simplicity overall. From this viewpoint, it seems like the huge amount of noise in the genome is a good argument against design. When you make an antenna or a medicine or retrovirus to introduce some factor, do you use a big randomized version that might have numerous untold effects? Or do you make something that does the specific job you want done in as simple a manner as possible?

I've seen attempts at this, basically revolving around the 4-Letter Word there and the fact that DNA has its own four letters, adenine guanine cytosine and thymine. The idea is presented that all of biology is a variation on those 4 letters, along the same lines as all of reality is brought into formation through the various permutations of the tetragrammaton in Sepher Yetzirah.The real problem here is that DNA has 4 separate letters, whereas the Shem only has 3, one of which is used two different ways. At this point they try to drag uracil in as the variant, but the jig is already up. The signature in the cell is obviously some ancient entity with a 5 letter name, two of which are different pronunciations of the same actual character.Hmm, wonder who that could be?