Is there a legitimate argument for design?

That is fair. It will take time to go back in the thread to the specific posts that raised my questions as I did not take notes. I will be back when I can reference prior posts that raised questions for me. Should I respond to those posts as I go, or refer back to post numbers in a single reply?

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One last bit of advice: let your skin thicken a little. We can get a little rough and tumble here. You'll see exchanges between members that appear to reveal bitter hostility, when in reality, those two members may be quite friendly and respectful.

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I have also seen new members come in and be bullied into silence. I did not perceive the exchange to be friendly and respectful. I understand the concept of a troll on a forum. Don't get into the bullying until one reveals himself as such. I don't think i have earned such treatment yet. jar hit me out of the gate.

Hi taiji2 and welcome to the fray. Well I would say that by definition ideas are not objects that can be sensed or perceived the way material objects can be sensed or perceived. We could agree that it is a fact that ideas exist, as we can experience them, discuss them and convey them to others ... or we can agree that all is illusion.Science can investigate some aspects of ideas - how they are transmitted and how accurate the transmission is. Some certainly appear to be ideas that have been passed down from generation to generation with varying degrees of modification in the process.Dawkins coined the term "meme" to apply to ideas that are passed from generation to generation that have a survival/reproduction advantage, in similar fashion to the way genes are passed from generation to generation via selection of traits that improve survival or reproduction.We could also agree that if all the people that knew a certain idea (meme carriers) died that the idea would die out (become extinct), in similar manner to the way certain genes become extinct.We can also see examples of this meme transmission in Japanese "Snow Monkey" macaques where potato washing was 'invented' by one female and the idea spread to other members of the troop.Blue Planet Biomes - Japanese Macaque

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Potato washing by a troop in Koshima was first started by a one and a half year old female named Imo. Researchers would put sweet potatoes along the beach to bring the monkeys out in the open. Imo found that she could get the sand off the potato better by dipping it into the river water, rather than brushing it off with her hands, like the other monkeys were doing. Her brothers and sisters imitated her first and then their mother. Over time the entire troop took to washing sand off potatoes with river water. At first they simply washed the sand off, but Imo soon found that the potatoes tasted better if seasoned with salt water from the ocean. They began to bite into the potato then dip it into the sea water to season it and bite again. Imo was a bit of a genius for a monkey because she also discovered wheat washing. She would make a ball of wheat and sand and throw it into the water. The wheat would float up to the top where she could pick it up and eat it without the sand.

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Biological evolution is not always gradual, nor does it necessarily take eons for changes to appear and be incorporated into a breeding population.The process of evolution involves changes in the composition of hereditary traits, and changes to the frequency of their distributions within breeding populations from generation to generation, in response to ecological challenges and opportunities ... and it is a FACT that this has been observed to occur in virtually every living species ...... and memes would likely follow similar patterns, being more prevalent in some cultural environments than in other, and likely undergoing modification when moving into new cultural environments. At this point I think you are stretching the analogy a bit further than is necessary.Certainly some ideas are new, and not previously recorded; and some new ideas are built on a foundation of other ideas ... we reach new heights of understanding of the universe because "we stand on the shoulders of giants" who have preceded us ... who stand on the shoulders of other giants ... ( and it is giants all the way down ... )So: do you think there is a legitimate argument for design?You picked this topic and apparently have read all the preceding posts, so you should know that this thread is about valid ideas for (intelligent) design. This forum likes to keep to specific topics in each thread (it minimizes confusion and encourages focus on specific concepts) -- and you can always start a new thread if you can't find a previous topic to suit.See Proposed New TopicsEnjoy

That's a fair point, taiji2. I'm not suggesting we are all always fair and respectful, although a few folks here pretty much are.I'm not, by any means; I have my own triggers, as do jar and many others. However, we have fair-minded moderators, although it is difficult for them to examine every post. I have previously been suspended from this forum for immoderate speech, but not recently.As I said before, there's often a good bit of rough-and-tumble. In any large group discussing strongly held beliefs in opposition, tempers flare, quick judgments are made...We are all flawed creatures, yes?In my experience the best response is to remain calm and focused on your own message.We do have quite fair-minded moderators. If you feel someone's treatment of you is particularly egregious, you can complain.Click on the Forums button just under the top banner; you'll see the top section is labeled Board Administration: in the Public Record section, you can examine Suspensions and Bannings to see what kind of conduct was deemed unacceptable.In Suggestions and Questions, you'll find Report Discussion Problems Here. It is generally considered bad form to lodge complaints in actual discussion threads.Most of the regular members here have enjoyed brief suspensions--or more--now and then.As I said, strong beliefs, flawed creatures

I guess whichever suits you better, but please quote what you're replying to. Normally it's considered wrong to answer different posts in the same reply, but that applies to ongoing conversations, there's no rationale for the rule in this case.

Your talking about doing a significant amount of work either way, and if you do a good job, you'll get some discussion going. Do whichever is easiest for you.

My opening questions were to get answers from science on the nature of ideas. Given that ideas have no form or mass and leave no footprint (in the materialist sense), does science consider ideas real. If the answer is yes, has science made any study (scientific method assumed) of ideas. I am speaking objective study. I am not speaking of subjective study such as psychology. Study of social or political impact of ideas for instance is subjective and not what I am after. Is there empirical study of ideas in the scientific world. If so, which branch of science promotes such study?The question already asked is what does this rather abstruse line of questioning have to do with Intelligent Design. The answer is: What is design if not an idea. If, therefore, the scientific community has not addressed, studied, and developed supportable theory about ideas, the scope of study required to form any conclusions in the ID debate is flawed.I have many questions. I have zero answers derived using the scientific method (about ideas), but I am doubtful any of you do either. I am obviously not committed to the notion that ID is absolute BS.One of the first questions I expect from you is "where's the evidence". My answer is that the evidence for design is all around us. My challenge to you is to show me anything in nature that doesn't reek of sophisticated design. I suppose that you will challenge me as a rational observer in collecting data. If so, tell me what is the alternative.I ask you to give me acceptable mathmatics of chance to support the notion that the huge jumps in complexity occured within random selection due to chance mutation. Are there studies on the rate of mutation and the rate of successful mutation within that?One further question. Has anyone discussed the possibility that "junk" DNA might represent unused potential (can be switched on in the future) as well as true junk (has been switched off in the past)?

Well yes, for the same reason that Alice does in my dialog. I'm not sure why you dismiss psychology as "subjective". How do you feel about neuroscience?If these are not objective studies of ideas, what would one look like if we had one? Is it actually your opinion that a true, "objective" science of ideas would require us to be able to weigh ideas, pour them into test tubes, see what color they are? If not, what are you after? That's a long way to get to a rather forced conclusion. After all, if that line of reasoning worked, well, the theory of gravity is an idea. Quantum electrodynamics is an idea. The laws of thermodynamics ... ideas. The germ theory of disease? An idea. Pythagoras' theorem? Idea. And so on. So if your reasoning worked, you could say of pretty much anything: "If, therefore, the scientific community has not addressed, studied, and developed supportable theory about ideas, the scope of study required to form any conclusions about [fill it the blank] is flawed." You have come up with an argument which, if correct, would stop scientists from sciencing altogether, when all you were aiming at was stopping them from talking about ID. Which is excessive, firstly because we need them to do science and secondly because they hardly ever do talk about ID.(As a minor point, wouldn't your argument also apply to the proponents of ID as well as its critics? I don't see them with an "objective" theory of ideas, whatever that is. "If, therefore, the ID community has not addressed, studied, and developed supportable theory about ideas, the scope of study required to form any conclusions in the ID debate is flawed.")However, your argument is not a good one and does not prove that everyone is wrong about everything. For one thing, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. By your argument, any discussion, by scientists, of the theory of gravity (an idea) would have to be fatally flawed. So how do they get those communications satellites to stay up? Their discussion of the germ theory of disease, likewise flawed ... but they abolished smallpox. All without this objective theory of ideas of which you speak.Or perhaps they have one after all. For there is one sense in which all science is nothing but the study of ideas. It is the study of whether ideas about the natural world are good or bad. It largely ignores what one might call the ontology of ideas, but it is almost nothing but the study of their quality, and it does so with what in human affairs is the acme of objectivity. I would therefore suggest that so long as scientists confine themselves to saying whether this idea of design is a good or a bad one, they're on safe ground.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Sure. A lemon tree. An owl. A moth. A nudibranch.Now you may say that these "reek of sophisticated design"; but I can answer that they actually reek of evolution, and then where are we? Such conclusory assertions can't be used to support design or evolution. No-one has the notion that "huge jumps in complexity occurred", so it is unnecessary to support this notion. People have had similar ideas. But there is a rather fatal objection to them. These genes for the future would be subject to mutation, corrupting the data, but not to purifying selection kicking such corruptions out of the gene pool. Such genes would therefore be strafed into nonsense by mutation before the lineage got around to using them.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

The human knee.

HemorrhoidsExcretory system combined with sexual systemThat's two.

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Well yes, for the same reason that Alice does in my dialog.

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What dialog is that? When I read your posts, I see no additional dialog. Who is Alice? What reason does she give for science considering ideas real? Since Alice in Wonderland is the only Alice I can think of who might be used in the spirit of sarcasm, might that be the right answer? Even so, I still do not recall what Alice had to say about the science of ideas.From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaIn internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people,[1] by posting inflammatory,[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[3] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.Dr. Adequate, thanks for the response. I placed the wiki definition of troll above for your reference. As a new member of the forum, I did not know what to expect. Having read and reread this thread and having read portions of others, it is evident to me that you old-timers have a game going wherein you use troll behavior, bait a new member to the point at which they respond with similar troll behavior, at which time they are labeled as trolls and dismissed amid some sort of communal glee. Very ritualistic actually, and like Omnivorous says, it might be fun .... I guess it depends which end of the stick you are on.Now, my choices are:(1). Stay in the game, knowing full well what the game is. and respond with equal sarcasm and and inflammatory dialogue to see if I can win the game of baiting. Refer to my reply above and tell me if this is the sort of banter you are seeking.But, what am I trying to prove ........ who's got the biggest cleverness dick? (metaphorically of course)(2) Stay in the game and ignore the baiting remarks. This will be tough. I have to read the remark to know whether it is baiting, at which time my emotional response has been triggered. Ignoring my emotional response to your troll behavior would be difficult.But, what am I trying to prove... how thick my hide is?(3) Stay out of the game.So, see ya later! I will stay on the forum because there is lots of really good information here. Not interested in the game though,

See message #360, this thread.---As to your complaints, I have provided you with civil disagreement, courteously expressed. A troll, you say, is one who posts "inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages [...] with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response". My messages were neither inflammatory, extraneous, nor off-topic; and if they have provoked an emotional response, this was not my intention, that would be on you. If you cannot tell the difference between someone politely disagreeing with you, and someone trolling you, you would be well advised not to participate in discussions of ... well, pretty much anything.The one concrete complaint you have made about my posts is that you can't find where I have written a dialog involving a person named Alice. Well, now you can. Is there anything else wrong with my posts apart from the fact that I have expressed an opinion that isn't yours?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

That's it. I've been on the "wrong" side in a couple of debates here, going against half a dozen or more - but I try to be gentle with them. Just keep shooting and ignore the bullets whizzing past your head.

That's an easy one: the nested hierarchy.The pattern of shared and derived characteristics in complex life screams evolution and blind inheritance. A designer would be free to swap and mix design units as he see fits. Therefore, with design we expect there to be a lack of a nested hierarchy, and this is true for human designs. For example, automobiles and computers do not fall into a nested hierarchy. Artwork even by the same artist does not fall into a nested hierarchy. The observation of a nested hierarchy is smoking gun evidence of evolution, and contrary to everything we would expect from a intelligent design process.