Defence of Intelligent Design

Okay Bran, you may try to defend it if you wish. Once you’re done with your paper, bring it here and I’ll discuss it further. But for now, just so you know...Whatever wrote: And plenty more do not. Many have wasteful, dangerous, pointless, inefficient and/or utterly stupid designs. So define ‘perfection’. Wrong. Mammals do not appear fully formed; nor do tetrapods; nor do humans. So define ‘kinds’. Again, hogwash. Apart from it ignoring half a dozen other Kingdoms, there are plenty of hermaphrodite, asexual etc animals. And you see here why defining ‘kinds’ is crucial: how much evolution is allowed? Yet again, what’s a ‘kind’? Is it microevolution when an ape lineage ends up as a human? When a lineage of fishes becomes an amphibian? Because we have literally masses of evidence for these transitions. Wrong. Define ‘new gene’... Wrong. Define ‘new chromosome’... Just as evolution predicts! But if a new function is acquired by copying and mutation (eg the gaining of an antifreeze glycoprotein by antarctic notothenioid fish; the ability of bacteria to digest nylon, a substance never found in nature till recently)... if a new single chromosome can be formed by a mutation that fuses two chromosomes together (as in the human lineage, where our chromosome 2 is a fusion of the equivalent 2p and 2q of chimpanzees)... if such apparently new genes and chromosomes can be produced by copying and mutation, we’ll need a definitions of ‘new gene’ and ‘new chromosome’ too, so we can see why these things aren’t ‘new’. Come again? What designed what? The mechanism is perfectly capable of producing apparent designs. Which it never intended to. Here, look: I’m an ‘evolutionist’, and I am delighted to tell you that you may have god(s) invent the first replicators. Got that? Some god or other can start it all off, if you want. There. Feel better?Evolution is what you get, automatically and inevitably, once you’ve got replicators. They can originate in any way you like, as far as evolution’s concerned. So I don’t know whether your point is a straw man, or just plain irrelevant.There is, however, evidence behind the researches into abiogenesis. And though it’s still sketchy, no designer seems necessary. What’s certain is that no designer is required for all the stuff we normally marvel at. At least, if there was a designer, it is an incorrigibly stupid one. Are we? Well I suppose you could put it like that. But the thing is, we have found loads of them already. The gaps keep getting smaller. We keep finding fossils of organisms that creationists would have us believe are impossible. Again, we need to know what a ‘kind’ is.The reason we’re continually looking for missing links is that it’s nice to know more details. But what we have already amply demonstrates evolution. Define ‘kind’. Did mammals or tetrapods come on the scene fully formed? NO, THEY DID NOT. Drivel. Evolution is completely concerned with origin: with the origin all living and extinct species. The origin it does not explain, was never intended to explain... which evolutionary biologists may be interested in, but which is mostly irrelevant to them... that origin is the origin of life from non-life.If evolution is pretending it’s not concerned with origins (except as noted), how come there can be papers such as, for instance, Romer’s gap: tetrapod origins and terrestriality? (Note: Romer’s gap has been filled.) Again, wrong. As an ‘evolutionist’, I for one am interested in biological designs. So are anatomists, physiologists, cytologists... biologists in general. My own interest is in designs such as the human coccyx, wings that cannot work on ground-dwelling beetles, genes for making teeth in birds, and so on. Far from pretend[ing] the theory of evolution isn't concerned about design, it is the best explanation I’ve seen for it. Certainly better than the alternative, a clumsy, blundering half-witted and totally unevinced supernatural designer. (Heehee, I just mistyped it as deisigner -- perhaps more appropriate! ) Uh-huh. Designs like these? This website is frozen. You would replace it with a theory that postulates a designer who’d design baleen whales to have teeth and hind limbs as embryos, then reabsorb them? A designer that gave non-feeding insect adults (eg mayflies) useless mouthparts? That’s an improvement?! Yeah, see my link above for Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes...Note, too, that most of whatever’s arguments are against evolution, not for intelligent design. Let’s hear some arguments for it, please.TTFN, Oolon

No, not whether you understand it, but what you understand by the term.How can we answer you, if we don't know what you yourself mean by the term? If we were to simply go with the usual meanings, we may not be providing what you're looking for.Cheers, DT

Hah! And this demonstrates what, exactly? Are you claiming this is irreducibly complex, perhaps? How is it inexplicable via evolution? Since when was evolution unable to explain good designs?Okay, if you want to talk whales, please explain via intelligent design:

• why embryonic whales and dolphins have hind limb buds, that are then reabsorbed
• why embryonic baleen whales have teeth, that are then reabsorbed
• why whales can suffer from decompression sickness (‘the bends’) if they surface too rapidly, just like any other mammal
• why whales do not have gills -- why they have to breathe air; it is not uncommon for newborns to suffocate if they don’t get to the surface in time for their first breath
• why whales have bits of pelvis and hind limb buried deep inside the muscles of their back ends
• why the whale recurrent laryngeal nerve loops under the aorta by the heart on its way from one side of the ‘neck’ to the other
• why whale sperm (not sperm whales ) cannot be made at their body’s ambient temperature: they have internal testes, but being surrounded by huge tail-moving muscles, these require an elaborate system to cool the blood around the testes.
• why several river dolphin species have eyes that barely work, which are superfluous anyway as the water is too cloudy and they manage fine with echolocation
• why whale retinas, like all other mammalian retinas, are wired in facing away from the incoming light
• why whale mitochondria, like all other mitochondria, have their own, entirely separate DNA

... and so on.

I was under the impression that the reason insects cannot grow really big is because of their respiratory system. Spiracles, tubing etc, leading to diffusion at the ends. There's a practical upper linit to the length of functional tubing possible, and so to the size the critter can be.But that's A Level biology from 1986, so I might be wrong...DT

As Barry Cryer said on Radio 4 the other day (ref Kilroy):"He makes points that are hard to ignore, but it's worth the effort."

Interesting. What kind are zebras, quaggas, asses and, say, Pliohippus?DT