INTELLIGENT DESIGN: An Engineer’s Approach

Ok, but cars all travel in the same way - an engine rotates wheels to travel over roads.Let's say that your car designers branch out into the submarine business. Does it still make sense to reuse previous plans? Does it make sense to, say, design a fast attack sub that encorporates the double-wishbone suspension?No, of course not. Why does a submarine need a suspension? But that's exactly the pattern we see in the natural world - reusing parts that don't make any sense, like the whale's pelvis and hind legs. And would you copy the things that were broken in the old designs, like the broken Vitamin C gene shared by all primate species? Why would you?Unreasonable levels of "copying old designs" is what we see in the natural world, which is futher proof of evolution. Just a lingusitic note - "specie" means "money" or "coinage"; the word your looking for is "species", which refers to a reproducive community of like organisms. Used in this way it is self-plural.Also - you're entire argument seems contradictory. You list all the reasons that there doesn't appear to be a designer; from this, you conclude that there is a designer but he simply doesn't want to be found. Exactly what would you expect the world to look like if organisms had evolved via random mutation and natural selection, through common descent with modification from an individual ancestor, unguided by any divine agency?

How about this one?1) Living things are far, far more complex than anything the most intelligent creatures we're aware of have been able to create themselves.
2) Therefore, living things are too complex to have been designed.

What makes you think that's not true? Simplicity and elegance are the hallmark of good design, so when we see simplicity, we should suspect design.Complexity, interdependance, single-points-of-failure, and other mechanically dubious design philosophies are the hallmark of incompetent design, or, more often, design that "grows" from the ground up (like the way a city's highways are designed, usually piecemeal, over several decades by many individuals; or the way a building's plumbing might become complex and interdependant as a result of many, many plumbers fixing individual problems one at a time rather than dealing with the plumbing of the whole building.) Thus, when we see the kind of structures present in the natural world, among living things, the very last thing we should conclude is a top-down, big-picture Designer.Look, it makes perfect sense to me; maybe just because I've been around design and designers all my life. Did you have a rebuttal or were you just going to call my argument "dumb" and be done?

Have I thought of hot cold? Or white-colored black? Your question makes no sense. Simplicity and complexity are antonyms. A /= ~A is the most basic syllogysm in logic. That you don't know how to respond to an argument? Yeah, that's pretty obvious.

Well, no, let's not say that. We're talking about living things, after all, which exhibit among them a very wide variety of modes of locomotion - any number of legs, wings, fins for water, etc. Living things exist in every part of the Earth and locomote themselves in every physically possible way.Restricting the analogy to cars doesn't make sense; cars all get about the same exact way. That was the impression I got from your OP. It seemed like you were listing reasons that the "designer" was obscured. The most obvious reason for why the "designer appears not to want to be found" is because there is no designer. Shared homologies, especially nonsensical ones like whale pelvises or broken Vitamin C genes, are evidence that organisms evolved according to natural processes, not being specially created by God or anybody else.

So do boats and planes and submarines. You're simply using this as an excuse not to address my points about unreasonable homologies. Your reasoning isn't simplified, it's fallacious.It's pretty clear you're not able to address my point, hence this nonsense about "cars only" which serves no other purpose. Why don't you just admit it instead of being dishonest?

Well, hold your horses, chief. You're conflating speciation with morphologic change.You can get a new species with no change to morphology. You could have two organisms that appear completely physically identical to the eye, but would be two seperate species.This is because species is defined as a reproductive community, not a specific morphological layout. Of course, the funny thing is, scientists have created hundreds of new species in the lab (they look pretty much like the old ones), and plenty of weird new morphologies in the old species, as well.Drosophila melanogaster (the fruit or vinegar fly) is the model organism for this sort of research. The generation time is a matter of days or weeks, they're sexual, easy to breed and store, and they have fairly simple genetics. And, indeed, it only takes a number of generations of genetic isolation to produce new species of D. melanogaster, a simple proceedure that has been done hundreds of times.So, according to you - there's nothing left to do.

Nobody said anything about "sterile." We're talking about populations of fruit fly that breed amongst themselves freely but can't breed with their original founder population.That's speciation. I'm not talking about it, either. This is just plain ol' mutation and selection at work. Oh, no. You're not done with my example, yet. The fruit flies aren't made sterile, and no genetic engineering was used, so your objections don't hold up. The result of this work, again, was several new species of fruit fly. So what you've asked for has already been provided. (My guess, Mr. "Level-headed", is that you'll give voice to any objection whatsoever, including objecting to made-up issues, in order to duck out of your boast. In other words the pattern you've set with this post is sure to continue.)

Do you just not understand that "Kilias, et al. (1980)" is a reference to a paper, or what?You want to know how they determined sterility? Then find the paper they're talking about:

quote:

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Kilias, G., S. N. Alahiotis and M. Delecanos. 1980. A multifactorial investigation of speciation theory using Drosophila melanogaster. Evolution. 34:730-737.

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and read for yourself. ..wha? Assortitive mating means that flies from population A only mate with other flies from population A, and flies from B only mate with B, even when you put A and B in immediate physical proximity.In other words, exactly what you would expect if you put two different species together. ..."granted"? I'm sorry; I don't understand. No, there's not. There's a bunch of words that you don't understand because you didn't actually read the paper and you don't know anything about biology. (Apparently, you don't even know what the purpose of an abstract is.)Read the paper. How hard is that, seriously? But pretending you've overturned evolution because the abstract doesn't present the evidence is idiotic. The evidence is in the paper. The abstract simply tells you what the paper is about. ..wha? Granted by who? ..why would it be? Do you just not understand the purpose of abstracts?If you want to know more than the basic essentials, you need to read the paper. It's not clear why that's a major difficulty for you, since everything you need to find the paper is down in the bibliography. That's not at all what happened; the problem here is that you're completely unfamiliar with biology, and as a result, you have absolutely no understand of the material put before you.The whole population did not "die off." Is this the best you have to bring to the table? Name-calling? Did it occur to you that some of us have actually read these papers?No? Typical for creationists, I guess. It's amazing but it literally never occurs to many of you that the primary scientific literature exists to be read. I can think of a number of terms to describe an approach that proceeds from total ignorance of the field in question, but "top-down" is not one of them.

Poor creationists. You all can't even agree on what it would take to prove evolution.Here you are, saying that humans designing life would disprove intelligent design. Randman, over there in the Showcase, on the other hand, tells us that humans designing life proves intelligent design (because humans are intelligent), and disproves evolution.Which is it? You and your creationist peers need to figure that out amongst yourselves, I think. (Personally, I think it's pretty obvious that it has absolutely nothing to do with evolution either way.) So, what you're saying is this - the failure of X to achieve a certain goal is proof that you need even more X to do it.Are you related to George W Bush, by any chance?

This is nonsense stemming from biological ignorance. Less than 5 percent of living animal species possess the calciferous skeleton and striated muscle tissue you refer to, here. Solar power? I think your problem here is that you simply don't think things through before you post about them - hence these obvious and embarassing errors.

I'd appreciate it if you could address message 144. This is just more nonsense based on your ignorance of biology.1) Genetic "sequencing" doesn't have "syllables."
2) You can't "express... as a genotype." Genotypes are expressed as phenotype.
3) It's not in the least bit clear about what you mean about "taking a line of "aggressive" hybridization too far away from its original species", or how that's revelant to the current situation. How would punishing hybridization prevent speciation? Preventing hybridization would cause speciation to occur faster, in less generations.
4) What is a "second-order marker" supposed to be?
5) Genetic sterility that isn't caused by chromosome count mismatches is almost always a recessive genetic trait, which means that your putative "sterility gene" would only be expressed in offspring when the parents were most similar, not less. Does science know enough to know that you're writing nonsense? Yes, it does, I assure you.

What, are you joking? More often than not, the creationist of the day around here knows so little about their own creationist arguments, and is so incompetent at delivering them, that the evolutionists have to deliver their arguments for them before they can be refuted. The proof of this, of course, is Answers in Genesis's infamous "Creationists arguments that you should stop using already" list, which details creationist arguments so stupid or easily refuted that they're an embarrasment to the movement as a whole.The ignorance of creationists and evolutionists in regards to their opponents arguments is not symmetric. Creationists are universally even more ignorant of evolutionary biology than they are of creationism, and considering that they can't even seem to agree amongst themselves which arguments should be used, that's pretty ignorant.If you don't believe me, there's about a dozen threads here where evolutionists take on the role of creationists, and it's always a dead-on impersonation of the arguments. Of course, creationists don't know enough to supply the arguments of evolution, even in parody.