What exactly is ID?

You are assuming the conclusion. You first need to demonstrate that it did originate from an intelligent source before you can speak of it as fact. I have already shown that it is impossible to calculate any probabilities where it concerns abiogenesis. You first need to know what the simplest replicator is, how many possible replicators are possible, and how many "tries" there were. Do you have any of this?Here, let's try this on for size. I have a huge box full of tiles. You reach in and pull out a tile that has the number 42 on it. From this information alone, what are the odds that you would have pulled out a tile with the number 42 on it? Transposases are incapable of detecting what is and is not beneficial to the organism. "We report findings from an experiment designed to test the effects of environmental variability on the adaptation and divergence of replicate populations of E. coli. A total of 42 populations evolved for 2000 generations in 7 environmental regimes that differed in the number, identity, and presentation of the limiting carbon source. Regimes were organized in two sets, having the sugars glucose and maltose singly and in combination, or glucose and lactose singly and in combination. Combinations of sugars were presented either simultaneously or as temporally fluctuating resource regimes. This design allowed us to compare the effect of resource identity and presentation on the evolutionary trajectories followed by replicate populations. After 2000 generations of evolution, the fitness of all populations had increased relative to the common ancestor, but to different extents."
sourceThere you go. Increased fitness over 2,000 generations.

Can you back any of this up? Research in the field of the RNA World Hypothesis have shown that you don't need proteins to have enzymatic activity. RNA molecules can carry out these reactions. So right off the bat it is wrong to state that you MUST have proteins. Secondly, others have shown that proteins can and do form abiotically. Thirdly, why are 200 proteins necessary? You never seem to support this with anything, and has already been shown RNA can replace proteins.

If I were to see Ohno (1984)PDF , where exactly would I find anything supporting this claim? I've searched for poison, toxin, temperature, transposase, transposon, mobile elements, starvation, starve and activate; none of those words are to be found anywhere in the paper.So where precisely is this claim supported by Ohno (1984)?I'm quite prepared to agree that a number of bacteria change their mutation rates dependent on elements of their environment, but that isn't something that the Ohno paper talks about. Nor does it mean they adapt based on selective pressures.TTFN,WK

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So much for letting it drop !

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Anyway, thanks for admitting that I was right about what you said , and that I did NOT need to read your mind.

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I can't drop something that you are insisting on, while in the same time, that thing is not true. And it ain't.

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Just because Dembski uses D sometimes to mean the D component of (D,*) and sometimes to mean (D.*) does not mean that they are the same thing. So, no, D does not equal (D,*). "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller is just D, not (D,*). And neither is equal to 10^20

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However you look at it, "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller is the pattern. For which you claim that it's D. Fine, let it be D. But it's complexity is 10^20.

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Yes there is - it's the D in the pattern "(D,*)".

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Wait, so now you admit that (D,*) is the pattern? Please, make up your mind already.

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Do I need to remind you that we want the probability of D*, not the probability of the unspecified event ? Do I need to point out that this example proves exactly that ? Do I need to repeat that the probability of meeting the specification I gave - P(D*) - is at least 0.25 regardless of the number of throws ?

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Yes I know that. You do not have to remind me. I'm just saying that more throws are more complex than less. Do you agree with that or not?

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Since we're talking about the details which AREN'T part of the pattern, they can't match it.

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Which details are those?

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OK, then 50 proteins are NOT part of D*. D* is "getting a bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller - no mention of 50 proteins there. Whether it is mentioned in NFL doesn't matter if it isn't mentioned in the specification.

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It's so very importhant. You actually agreed on this. This here is your quote:

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p(T|H) would be the probability of meeting the specification (i.e. p(D*|H)). Here's what it says about T (p18)

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These are your words. You agreed that the probability P(T|H) is P(D*|H). And I agree also. And as we all SHOULD know, P(T|H) is the 50 protein part flagellum. How do I know? Because Dembski says so. Read carefully.

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It follows that —log2[ 120 10 ϕ
S(T)P(T|H)] > 1
if and only if P(T|H) < 140
2
1 10− , where H, as we noted in section 6, is an evolutionary chance
hypothesis that takes into account Darwinian and other material mechanisms and T, conceived
not as a pattern but as an event, is the evolutionary pathway that brings about the flagellar
structure (for definiteness, let’s say the flagellar structure in E. coli). Is P(T|H) in fact less than
140
2
1 10− , thus making T a specification? The precise calculation of P(T|H) has yet to be done.
But some methods for decomposing this probability into a product of more manageable
probabilities as well as some initial estimates for these probabilities are now in place.33

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See, he says that a precise calculation has yet to be done, but a manegable one already exists. And he points to the reference number 33. Which when you go and look it up, is the chapter 5.10 of his book The No Free Lunch. And guess what is that chapter called? It's called "Doing The Calculation". Yes, and in this chapter he finely discusses how to get the number 10^2954, and clearly says that the flagellum consists of 50 parts.Therefore P(T|H) = P(D*|H) = 50 protein part flagellum = 10^2954.

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That doesn't even make sense. 10^20 considered as an event is 10^2954 ?

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No. 10^20 is teh complexity of the pattern. As I already quoted THREE TIMES already! I'm not going to do it again.

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Dembski also says that it's the specificational resources.

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So it's both. FIne?

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But the combining is to eliminate the unspecified information. So if you agree that we shouldn't count it then you have to agree with the combining.

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WHAT!?

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We don't want the probability of the event, just the probability of meeting the specification. And in the case of the flagellum I have no idea of how to calculate it. And neither does Dembski.

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LOL WRONG! Of course you need the probability of the event!? How are you going to know if the probability of matching the patternt witht he specified event is small enough to infer design!? That's the whole point of design detection and you're missing it!

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In that case can you quote him actually saying that ? Because you didn't.

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Fine, I will do it now. Even though this is just stupid. I mean the whole book is about geentic entropy and how information is degrading... Just buy the book okay?

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Genetic entropy - This is a fundamental biological principle. Apart from intelligent intervention, the functional genomic information within free-living organisms (excluding viruses) must decrease. Like all other aspects of the world we live in, the "natural vector" within the biological realm is degeneration, with disorder consistently increasing over time.

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Page 217.

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There you go. The functional genomic information is decreasing. This is genetic entropy. No buts about it.And look at something else. Like I have been saying all along, genetic entropy does decrease reproductive fitness, but not ALWAYS. Because biological functions are not exactly 100% correlated with reproductive fitness. Sanford says teh same thing in this quote here.

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As fitness declines due to mutation accumulation, the genomic background itself will be changing. In reference to selection for a given nucleotide, there will be rpogressively more and more noise from all the other segregating mutations which are accumulating. While some aspects of environmental noise will scale with fitness (this diminishes proportionaly as fitness declines), soem aspects of environmental noise will not scale with fitness, e.g noise due to natural disasters. This latter type of noise, which does not diminish in concert with fitness decline, will grow progressively more disruptive to selection as fitness declines. Continuously increasing noise cannot be effectively neutralized by noise averaging.

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Page 204. and 205.

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It seems as thoug I was right. Genetic information is not perfectly correlated with reproductive fitness and noise averaging is not going to effectively remove genetic entropy.

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And it says that it is only a problem when fragmentation REDUCES the effective population.
Therefore it doesn't support you.

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Those things always happen in the nature. It's like saying that something only happens when people eat or walk. They always do that.

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If you were agreeing with me all along, then why were you arguing ?

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I'm not agreeing with you. This is what you said:YOU: "You are claiming that beneficial mutations dont' help!"
ME: "No. I said that they do help, but they do not remove genetic entropy completely."
YOU: "No you said that they do not hel at all."
ME: "No, I said that they DO help, but not enough to completely stop genetic entropy."
YOU: "No, you said they simply don't help at all..."
ME: "No, I did not!"
YOU: "Yes you did..."
etc...
etc...See?

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They do have to mention it if they are saying that this information loss IS genetic entropy.
Which is the point you were supposedly trying to argue.

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Which is true as I quoted above.

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Which only covers "losses of information" that negatively impact fitness. Not those that increase fitness.

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WRONG! Totally wrong! Decrease in genetic information can increase reproductive fitness, precisely becasue the correlation is NOT perfect. Examples: sickle cell, bacterial resistance, HIV resistance.

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It does contradict you because it makes it clear that the problem only exists for low effective populations sizes.

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Ahem. The article talks about LARGE populations.

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By selection and drift removing deleterious mutations from the population at the same rate as they arrive. Thus we have an equilibrium without selection being 100% effective.

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But that by definition is natural seelction at 100%. Which is impossible. Look. Tell me, what is te unit of selection? Is it a nucleotide, a gene, a chromosome, or the whole genome? What gets evaluated by natural selection before it reproduces?I'll tell you. The whole genome. That is the unit of selection. Therefore, some organisms that are more fit than others might as well carry some deleterious mutations with them. And on avrage they will. Natural seelction does not look at the singl nucleotide to evaluate the organism. It looks at the whole genome. So even those who are more fit are going to carry their deleterious mutations into the next population. And genetic entropy increases.

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Wrong. The more deleterious mutations in the population the faster drift will remove them. That is one of the factors that your "example" didn't take into account.

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But on average it won't remove all. Neitehr will tehre be an equilibirum, they will accumulate. Look, natural seelction is invoked in the first place to remove deleterious mutations. Without it, genetic entropy is even faster. You can't turn the table and say that genetic drift is better than natural selection. It's not. Without natural selection a species is doomed even faster.

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I could tell you if it was a printer or a type writer. I could tell you if it was a laser printer, an ink jet, a dot matrix or a daisy wheel. I could tell you if it was the original or a xerox.

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And that's all if the printer is working absolutely perfectly. If the printer has a slight flaw, I can tell you much more about it.

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If it was done on a type writer, the FBI crime lab could tell you which brand, a range of model years for that brand _AND_ if they actually found the type writer, they could prove it was produced on that particular machine.

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This is just another example of you citing a subject you know NOTHING ABOUT and then claiming that because YOU KNOW NOTHING about it, no one can.

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AND, the whole basis of your argument is FALSE.

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You are claiming that if I had a piece of paper with writing on it, I couldn't tell you the mechanism involved. Then you NAME two mechanisms which could produce it.

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Do you get that?

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Do you see HOW that is different than what you are claiming?

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You are ACKNOWLEDGING THAT YOU DON'T HAVE _____ANY_____ MECHANISMS!!!

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None. Not "can't choose between two which are testable and reproduceable".

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You have NO mechanism save "Jew Magic" which you already admitted you don't believe exists.

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Yes, that's why all those people who send death threats are so easily identified. Obviously NOT! If you design a death threat in such a way to mimich a particular mechanism or a tool, you can't detect the original mechanism or the tool that it was done with. So your mechanism of design method fails.

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Again, you are demonstrating your complete ignorance. You can WATCH FILM of them creating it. I'm sure there is a museum at Mt. Rushmore which LITERALLY HAS SOME OF THE TOOLS USED!!!

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Further, YOU DO KNOW there are mechanisms for shaping rock. You've SEEN them in use.

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You do NOT KNOW that there are Jew Beams. No one ANYWHERE at ANYTIME has EVER seen ANYTHING LIKE JEW BEAMS in use.

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Therefore NO MECHANISM. No mechanism = no design.

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The point is that even if I didn't see them do it, and I didn't, I could still say it was designed.

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Can you give us examples of "other objects" for which NO ONE knows the mechanism?

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Remember, WE are not restrained by your EXTREMELY LIMITED KNOWLEDGE.

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Almost all biological structures.

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Not are we limited by my knowledge. Someone, somewhere can tell you EXACTLY step by step how ANY given digital watch was made.

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Hell, there is a TV SERIES called "How It's Made" which WALKS YOU THROUGH THE PROCESS for TONS of different objects.

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Just because YOU don't know doesn't mean it's MAGIC!!!!

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But even if we didn't know the mechanism we can say that a watch is designed. I don't know how ANY watch is designed. Or a car, or a computer. neither do I, nor do you know the detailed process or the mechanism of designing a watch. Yet if you found one on teh street you would claim it was designed. Why? Remember, you do not know the mechanism!

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Do you HONESTLY not know the difference between GRAVITY and JEW MAGIC?

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I've give you a hint. I can TEST and measure GRAVITY. You CAN NOT test nor measure JEW MAGIC.

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Neither did I claim that I can. Now show me where has a natural cause produced anythign like a computer.

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That's why it's called "translation".

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Someone call Abe Lincoln to come and free this guy. I've been owning him so long I think I gotta give him 40 acres and a mule.

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That's a good one! You never responded to any of my scientific arguments, so now we are arging semantics. So what happened to that Vertical NFL theorem I was talking about? Did you ever reply to me on how you would go around that? No, you didn't. And yous ay you own me? LOL, anyone?Edited by Smooth Operator, : No reason given.

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Things that happen in the natural world leave evidence behind. Things that are made up like fantasy and magic do not leave evidence behind.

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Exactly. I agree. That's why we have no traces of single celled organisms evolving into people in the process that took about 3.6 billion years.

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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.

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That's like saying that when you find a watch in the forest, that if that watch was designed, the person who left it there MUST HAVE HAD left notes on how he made the watch. Ummm... why? Why should he have left that?

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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.

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Actually intelligence can do just that. Folders on a computer are done in just that way. There are folders within folders, and files within folders. There is a nested hierarchy.

We do have those traces. They are in our genomes. We share tRNA's and other features and these are signals consistent with shared ancestry. An examination of the watch will tell you how it was made. Close examination of the gears can tell you if they were forged or cast. You can examine the connections between metal parts to see if they were soddered, and using different techniques you may even be able to tell when it was soddered and where it was soddered. You can use isotope analysis to determine which batch of alloys was used to make different parts. You can even use the composition of different dyes and materials to determine it's place and time of origin. Of course, it would be even easier to look at the maker's mark. Folders from a single project can be found in different trees within the nested hierarchy resulting in a violation. Computer files are not arranged in a nested hierarchy by shared commonalities. You are just as likely to find a Word file in all lineages or scattered here and there. Computer files do not fall into a nested hierarchy, and there is no reason that they should. Life DOES fall into a nested hierarchy, and design can not explain this (or rather, design does not predict any pattern of homology). Evolution can explain this pattern of homology.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

No, we could deconstruct the watch and figure out that this gear must have been place after that one, before the spring was wound, and then they put this piece over here to hold it and on and on.But you don't even have the beginnings of anything for any kind of mechanism that the designer would have used on a flagellum, you have nothing at all.But the biggest problem with your design detection method is that you're assuming the flagellum was built randomly as if the evolutionary explanation is the parts just happening to come toghether with no direction from selection at all (and then arguing that it couldn't have came about that way so it must have been designed).But we know that selective pressure can weed out the addition of parts that don't work and keep the ones that do so the probability of it forming randomly without selective pressure doesn't have anything to do with evolution.Also, RAZD had an excellent point in Message 809 showing where an increase in information must have happened:

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See Figure 1 from Nature 421, 264 - 267 (16 January 2003); doi:10.1038/nature01313 (reproduced below)

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Walkingstick insects originally started out as winged insects (blue at start and top row). That diversified.

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And some lost wings (red). And diversified.

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And some regained wings (blue again). And diversified.

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And one lost wings again (Lapaphus parakensis, below, red again).

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Can you explain how this occurs when information is only lost?

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Wings
No wings
Wings
No wings

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All by loss of information? Did they 1st lose the information on how to make wings, then 2nd lose the information on how to lose the information on how to make wings, and then 3rd lose the information on how to lose the information on how to lose the information on how to make wings? How can you lose information to not do something that you have lost the information to do?

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There must have been a gain of information in there.

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I can't drop something that you are insisting on, while in the same time, that thing is not true. And it ain't.

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You indicated that the only important thing was the known function - which we agree occurred. All I did was make it clear that you earlier had argued for loss of ALL function. And you turn around and start trying to argue for the loss of ALL function again.

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However you look at it, "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller is the pattern. For which you claim that it's D. Fine, let it be D. But it's complexity is 10^20.

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It's the description D, not the pattern (D,*). And the "complexity" is just the specificational resources. It certainly ISN'T the probability of D*, which is what we want.

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Yes I know that. You do not have to remind me. I'm just saying that more throws are more complex than less. Do you agree with that or not?

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If you are referring only to the completely irrelevant unspecified complexity, then yes. But that only supports my point - we do not want nor care about that complexity. It is only the specified complexity which is never less than 0.25 for the specification - which is why that specification can never indicate design.

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Which details are those?

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The 50 proteins and their structure in the case of the flagellum. Probably some details of their arrangement, too. For my example with the coins the exact sequence - which is what your "complexity" above refers to.

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p(T|H) would be the probability of meeting the specification (i.e. p(D*|H)). Here's what it says about T (p18)

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These are your words. You agreed that the probability P(T|H) is P(D*|H). And I agree also. And as we all SHOULD know, P(T|H) is the 50 protein part flagellum. How do I know? Because Dembski says so.

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It follows that —log2[ 120 10 ϕ
S(T)P(T|H)] > 1
if and only if P(T|H) < 140
2
1 10− , where H, as we noted in section 6, is an evolutionary chance
hypothesis that takes into account Darwinian and other material mechanisms and T, conceived
not as a pattern but as an event, is the evolutionary pathway that brings about the flagellar
structure (for definiteness, let’s say the flagellar structure in E. coli). Is P(T|H) in fact less than
140
2
1 10− , thus making T a specification? The precise calculation of P(T|H) has yet to be done.
But some methods for decomposing this probability into a product of more manageable
probabilities as well as some initial estimates for these probabilities are now in place.33

---

See, he says that a precise calculation has yet to be done, but a manegable one already exists. And he points to the reference number 33. Which when you go and look it up, is the chapter 5.10 of his book The No Free Lunch. And guess what is that chapter called? It's called "Doing The Calculation". Yes, and in this chapter he finely discusses how to get the number 10^2954, and clearly says that the flagellum consists of 50 parts.

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In other words Dembski didn't completely botch the calculation in NFL - because Dembski says so. Unfortunately for you he did botch it. The calculation in NFL is NOT the probability of getting a "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propellor" or even close as should be quite obvious. The fact that it uses details which clearly aren't in the specification is a dead giveaway.

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But the combining is to eliminate the unspecified information. So if you agree that we shouldn't count it then you have to agree with the combining.

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WHAT!?

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It's quite simple. if we want p(D*) we want the probability of getting ANYTHING which satisfies the description D. So we combine the probabilities of everything which satisfies D.
So either you agree to the combining, or you disagree that we want the probability of D*.

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LOL WRONG! Of course you need the probability of the event!? How are you going to know if the probability of matching the patternt witht he specified event is small enough to infer design!? That's the whole point of design detection and you're missing it!

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The probability of matching the pattern - which is what Dembski's method uses to infer design - is the probability of D*.As Dembski says - TDI p165 So you're just laughing at Dembski

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It seems as thoug I was right. Genetic information is not perfectly correlated with reproductive fitness and noise averaging is not going to effectively remove genetic entropy.

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But only if the noise is increasing. So THAT "noise" is not genetic drift. Do pay attention to the context.

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Those things always happen in the nature. It's like saying that something only happens when people eat or walk. They always do that.

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No, it doesn't always happen. Populations can increase in size. They don't have to get fragmented to the extent that mutational load is a problem.

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I'm not agreeing with you. This is what you said:
YOU: "You are claiming that beneficial mutations dont' help!"
ME: "No. I said that they do help, but they do not remove genetic entropy completely."
YOU: "No you said that they do not hel at all."
ME: "No, I said that they DO help, but not enough to completely stop genetic entropy."
YOU: "No, you said they simply don't help at all..."
ME: "No, I did not!"
YOU: "Yes you did..."
etc...
etc...

​

See?

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Yes. I see that you are now agreeing with me that beneficial mutations DO help and that you were wrong to leave them out of your diagram.Perhaps instead of trying to cover up your mistakes you should try harder to avoid making them in the first place ?

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Ahem. The article talks about LARGE populations.

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With a LOW effective population size. Which is exactly the point I made.

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But that by definition is natural seelction at 100%. Which is impossible.

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So what you are saying is that less than 100% effectiveness is by definition 100% effective.
I don't think that makes much sense. It's quite clear that not all deleterious mutations are removed, and not all of those that are removed are removed by selection, so selection is obviously less than 100% effective.

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I'll tell you. The whole genome. That is the unit of selection. Therefore, some organisms that are more fit than others might as well carry some deleterious mutations with them. And on avrage they will. Natural seelction does not look at the singl nucleotide to evaluate the organism. It looks at the whole genome. So even those who are more fit are going to carry their deleterious mutations into the next population. And genetic entropy increases.

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With a large population size and genetic mixing from sexual reproduction there will be selection for and against individual alleles. Only in the case of pure clonal reproduction would it make sense to say that the whole genome was the unit of selection. Because without that the whole genome doesn't survive. It is just a feature of one individual.

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But on average it won't remove all. Neitehr will tehre be an equilibirum, they will accumulate. Look, natural seelction is invoked in the first place to remove deleterious mutations. Without it, genetic entropy is even faster. You can't turn the table and say that genetic drift is better than natural selection. It's not. Without natural selection a species is doomed even faster.

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But I am not saying that drift is better than selection. I am saying that drift AND selection both remove deleterious mutations. Obviously together they will remove more than selection alone !Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

Now you are just flailing. Clearly you don't know anything about this topic. You shouldn't have used it as an example - especially when arguing with someone who in fact does know a lot about this topic.Try and find a better example. This one, for you, is an epic fail. Seeing or not seeing something get made is not the determining factor in detecting design. It's the ability to determine the MECHANISM used.If you DON'T HAVE A MECHANISM, you _CAN NOT_ distinguish between NATURALLY OCCURING THINGS and DESIGNED THINGS.I've already given you SEVERAL EXAMPLES of NATURALLY OCCURRING THINGS which _APPEAR_ designed. You have YET to come up with a single example of something which IS design but for which there can be NO mechanism.That's because you _CAN'T_ give anything as an example. And you know it. Anything which you _know_ is designed was created using a mechanism you can identify.The _ONLY_ example you can come up with is the very thing you are claiming.So, it's SPECIAL PLEADING. Therefore FAIL. Which are completely explained through naturally occurring mechanisms which we can detect, measure and reproduce in the lab.If we have a NATURAL solution to a problem, there is no reason to invoke BOTH a SUPERNATURAL JEW WIZARD _and_!! His MAGICALLY JEW BEAMS.You don't have a mechanism. We do. The end. You lose. If this is honestly true, then you are pretty fucking stupid.Seriously. You've NEVER looked under the hood of a car? You've never see the inside of a clock? You've never gone into your computer to replace RAM?No wonder you think everything is magic. You haven't got the first clue how ANYTHING works.What's next? "How does a pencil work?" "How do we know a sandwich was made?"You need to stop posting on the internet and go get some REAL WORLD experience. Of course I do. Not only do I know the mechanism of watch construction, I know the mechanism of the construction of ALL the PIECES in the watch.Are you _HONESTLY_ saying that you don't have the first clue how a small metal gear could be created? How a glass lense could be created? How things could be assembled one piece at a time?Are you actually making these claims? Are you retarded? Or are you simply being dishonest? I don't have to. I'm not the one claiming that computers were created by natural causes. YOU ARE.If YOU can't come up with an example, that's not MY PROBLEM - it's MY POINT!!! You have yet to make one.What you've done is repost and argument from a SELF PROCLAIMED FUNDAMENTALIST CREATIONIST about how HE THINKS the math works.However, since you can't site a SINGLE _REAL WORLD_ example of this math ACTUALLY proving anything, it's worthless.

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

No problem my friend. First I want to point out that your example starts and ends with in the "primate" family. Next I want you to know that I have seen this very picture many times. Thank you for being the first to point out that "A" is a modern chimp. Every one before you, that I have encountered, have tried to obscure that little bit of information which sent up the red flags right off the bat. Also I noticed that your link did nothing but take us to the picture with no information about the picture. Here is a better link for your future reference. Whenever I see this picture I am always reminded of a comment once made by Dr. Lyall Watson in Science Digest. I can't help it, it always just pops in my head: "Modern Apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans - of upright, naked, tool-making big-brained humans - is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter."Of course Watson made this comment back in 82 in an article called "The Water People" and I know that many things have changed in paleontology since then. For example, in an article featured in the New Scientist, a Dr. Bromage was referring to hominid morphological interpretation where he pointed out that early views of hominids have swung widely over the decades. He states that sometimes a specimens "human like qualities are emphasized and other times their ape like qualities. He had thought, for example, that after further research the famous Taung child would show a more human like bone surface pattern, but was surprised when its pattern revealed that of a typical ape. This of course is a specimen from Australopithecus africanus (from your provided list). Don't forget that when this particular specimen was first revealed back in 1924 it was strictly held as an ancient human ancestor, largely only because it is suspected to be a biped. Some argue that it was merely a still developing juvenile ancient chimp. And then there is of course this reconstruction of another specimen that does not even consist of a full skull, but rather only several small fragments. A complete article that clearly and concisely documents the fallacies of skull 1470 can be read here.Interestingly, I note that they were more than happy to include Neanderthals in the line, even though many of todays evolution authors have returned to the previous "separate species" hypothesis. The New York Times even reported July 11th 1997 that according to scientists: "Neanderthal man did not contribute to the DNA make-up of modern man. While Neanderthal man is classified by paleo-anthropologists as human, DNA analysis indicates that Neanderthal men never directly contributed to the DNA profile of modern man, and this same DNA evidence also strongly suggests that Neanderthal man never even interbred with modern man. In other words, Neanderthal man contributed nothing to the 'gene pool' of modern man."Also it seems to me that paleontologists have an enormous amount of freedom in the way they interpret findings. Take for example the famous Indonesian Hobbit fossil. This fossil, according to the above article, has sparked off a huge amount of controversy, in the course of "human evolution." Some believe the fossil is evidence for the existence of yet another human species, while others think it was just a modern human who could have suffered from microcephaly.If the above mentioned cases don't completely destroy the parade of skulls touted as human evolution, in your mind, they should at least give cause for extreme doubt. They make for a really neat slide show, but they do not present evidence of evolution of man. If the paleontologists themselves can not be sure what they are looking at, how can we laymen? Therefore they do nothing in the way of helping in our current discussion about added genetic information. That's because as British paleontologist and senior editor of the scientific journal Nature, Henry Gee said, "To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story- amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."

Only if you are going to count single celled A sexual bacteria which bear little to nothing in common with the rest of the living world around us, and which some can build a good case that they are "designed" to adapt in a multitude of novel ways. Well...I know I will get called on the carpet by the administrator if I respond to that off topic comment too much. So let me just say that you have stated a presumption (as fact) that I can easily throw a big wrench into. Now if you care to direct this conversation to the nearest "Age of the Earth" discussion, I'll be happy to continue it. I really don't know Percy. How much more complicated does a code that builds a person need to be, than one that builds pond scum?I am sorry Percy if you think I am too simplified in my replies. I like to keep it on a level that anyone can comprehend because I know that when I reply it is to more than just to you. And you don't have to have a Ph D. to get this stuff. So it seems that the question has boiled down to "What are the odds of a positive mutation even being possible?" Before we can answer this question, we must agree on what point is it safe to actually call something "impossible?" Most people normal mean that the chances of that "something" happening are so small that they are very improbable. And I do admit that just what constitutes impossible depends on who is doing the judging. Someone mentioned winning the lottery earlier, I’ll bet that if a person won the state lottery two weeks straight in a row, which is about a chance of one in a hundred trillion, the judges would think that that was pretty impossible. I’m sure they wouldn’t pay on the second win and they would probably investigate the first one with a fine tooth comb. Or if a person were to toss 150 quarters in the air, they should expect that only once in 10 to the 45th power tosses, that the coins would all come up heads.To put this into perspective of just how big that number is, lets imagine how long it would take to toss 150 coins that many times. Since flipping coins, counting all the heads, and then picking them all back up, can be very slow and time consuming, lets imagine we employed 1,000 super fast people to all help us toss coins. If each person could do the entire process once per second, and we allowed them to do this for one hundred years they still could only flip the coins about three trillion times, which is a long way away from 10 to the 45th power. So suppose you searched for a much faster way to flip coins and so what you did was you programmed a computer to simulate the tossing of 150 coins and it could do it in a "trillionth" of a second, and then you enlisted a billion of these simulators and all together you call them one "pod." Then from there you proceeded to use ten billion of these "pods" and you let them all run at that speed for 3000 years. Even in all of that time you would still only have flipped the quarters 10 to the 42 power times. My point in all of this should be obvious, that since no sane person would ever expect to get all 150 coins to land on heads. I believe anyone in there right mind would consider doing so to be basically "impossible." Therefore, I hope that we are safe to agree that the odds of 10 to the 45 th to one are basically impossible.So lets for now completely ignore the impossible odds of life forming from non-life. Lets forgo the concept where a single cell must develop all at once and fully capable of reproducing. And we will also ignore the fact that this had to occur from completely random processes from out of nonliving matter (meaning that natural selective processes don’t apply). We for now will just look at the possibility for the development of information to take place in the "already existing" DNA of a genome. What are the odds? Evolution has to explain how all the information in the DNA of plants and animals got into the genome to begin with. Evolution theory says that all life of today was built up through a gradual build up of steps of this information. Each step adding a small amount of information to the genome and in each step, selection has to test if the mutation is positive or not, and destroy the negative ones. You might look at mutations in the nucleotides of DNA like a writer making random changes in the letters of a book. Imagine if the writer of a novel were trying to improve his novel by changing letters at random. The writer would change a few random letters and then (keeping with reproduction processes) he reprints his book at least twice, once with the changes and once with the original. He would then check to see if he liked the changes and throw it away if he didn’t. He could not just keep the changes he liked; he would have to keep the entire text with all the random changes or throw it all away and stay with the original.It would be all or nothing. The random changes in the letters of the book corresponds with the random mutations said to occur in the DNA message of an organism, and the reprinting of the two copies corresponds with organisms ability to reproduce. The choice to keep one over the other corresponds with natural selection. Right about here, evolution proponents usually try to argue that the writer should be able to just hold on to those changes he likes and carry them on while disposing of the ones he doesn't like. However catch what they just did. They just unwittingly smuggled "intelligence" into the mix. For nature to "hold on to the changes it likes" and dispose of the ones it does not, implies that nature has a plan. But now evolutionists are adamant that the whole mutation process is completely random with no plan behind it. If nature has a plan then nature must have intelligence, and now we are talking about "intelligent design." No, the writer must keep all changes made to his novel at random (good and bad) or he must toss the whole thing out and stick with the original. This would dictate that he keep his changes to a bare minimum. Any random changes much more than one letter would have a much higher chance of rendering a negative change which would require destroying it and restarting. But then, even with the improvements there would be likely a problem that would cause him to reject it anyway. For example randomly changing a letter in one word might actually change that word into a new and improved word but perhaps now that word doesn’t make sense in the sentence or in the paragraph. Or it may not make sense in the reading of the book. If the book was about three mice, and the first letter of mice was changed to d to make dice, most of the other sentences with the word mice would need changing. And even if you could somehow change all the mice words to dice, you still would probably render the entire book to be unintelligible. This objection of course has been raised in the past and its a very valid one. To get an improvement you have to have several correlated changes all taking place at the same time and in just the right places. In other words you have to have much more than 150 coins all land on their heads at once in each and every step of the process of evolution. I haven’t calculated it, but obviously if you do, the odds of these correlated changes occurring all at once far surpasses our "impossible" number.Edited by Brad H, : No reason given.

No, I think you are unfairly characterizing my comments. Everything I have said is within the context of NEW genetic information being added to the genome via random mutation with a positive outcome. And that is what I am denying ever takes place. I am not denying that several manipulations can take place to allow for a positive outcome, but they are never the addition of new information. Donald Trump didn't become wealthy by losing money gradually, or transferring it from one bank to another. However there are times when falling just below a certain tax bracket can have its advantages. But in order to have gained the bulk of his wealth, he has to have had some NEW additions of funds taking place somewhere. And that is what I am saying. This aint "rocket surgery" Razd. At some point, to get from pond scum to people, there had to have been NEW additions taking place in the genetic code. It is these NEW additions that we never observe in biology. The beetle example I gave explains just fine how an organism can go from flier, to nonflying, back to flier, merely by manipulating the code that already exists within the gene pool. Also the walking stick fossil record (like all of the fossil record) is only evidence of a certain species existence. All presumed relationships and ages are merely just that...presumptions. They can not be scientifically tested. To observe a species with wings (at one presumed time frame) and then observe another without wings at a presumed later time frame, does not prove that one gave rise to the other, or that the two species did not coexist in one or both time frames, and especially does not prove that there was an addition of any NEW information to the gene pool. You are referring to your graph as if it is iron clad. Yet you have no basis for such an assumption. Unless the entomologists conclusions of species relational branching were actually observed and documented, they have no evidence that they are in fact related or in which order they are related. Nor do they have evidence of addition of new information to the genes. Your walking stick example simply does not fulfill the criteria of observed added new information.Edited by Brad H, : No reason given.

Except it is not a misguided assumption based on the whims of wishful thinking, but rather a well placed and logical conclusion based completely on past observation. Systems containing csi have only been observed being produced by intelligent sources (i.e. human). Not once has a system with csi ever been observed and recorded forming by purely natural unguided forces. Had even one system with csi been observed forming in nature by unguided processes, then the conclusion of intelligence might then be considered premature. But it hasn't and it isn't. I see. So if an ID proponent uses "present is the key to the past" ideology, it is considered a fallacy, but when an evolutionist does it its considered good science? Those figures are just given to give us an idea of the impossible odds the formation of first life must overcome. The fact of the matter is that present simple single celled organisms, such as heterotrophs, are considered by many evolutionary scientists to be the likely first life forms. Yet most microbiologists will tell you that such organisms are far from "simple" in many ways. Even if you could reduce a replicator like this by one tenth of that of today's heterotrophs, you still are not going to reduce the problem by enough to really matter. Yes this would be a huge problem if we had no way to peer into the box and examine its contents to see if the other tiles also had the number 42 on them. But the fact that we can see quite far down into the box allows us to at least get a ball park estimate. Old earth scientists claim the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. The oldest claimed fossils are stromatolites 3.5 billion years old, formed by blue green algae very similar to what we observe today. That means (by their time scale) mother nature only had about a billion years to chance form the first replicating cell complete with photo syntheses capabilities, and it had to do so without the existence of DNA and RNA to guide the process.