Does complexity require intelligent design?

Here's some things I think are accurate.1 Nothing Darwin predicted would be found in the fossil record was.2 The cambrian explosion exploded the myth of evolution and scientists have been trying to patch it back together.3 There is not one uninterrupted record of evolution from one order to another. There are large gaps in every "line."4 Current theory that beneficial mutations are the mechanism of change ignore the fact that beneficial mutations are extremely rare, far outnumbered by harmful ones.

That would work theoretically for a large population. I don't see that there is enough time for that to have worked allowing for smaller gene pools and other setbacks.Why would their be a higher reproduction rate for the benefited population? I'll see if I can find those statistics.

If man is merely the product of mutations in animals, rather than the special creation of God, morality is just an abstract concept, with no standard, or guidelines of behavior, from an authoritative source. If one were to use the 2 laws that Jesus gave, there would be a lot less robbing, torturing and killing. If every animal is just the product of random mutations {including man}, doesn't that make our existence just a random event in the universe with no meaning? The human race and everything it accomplishes, no more meaningful than a petri dish of bacteria. The World Health Organization estimates that in the year 2000 approximately one million people will die from suicide. A global mortality rate of 16 per 100,000. One death every 40 seconds.
The WHO further reports that:
In the last 45 years suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide. Suicide is now among the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44 (both sexes). Suicide attempts are up to 20 times more frequent than completed suicides.
Although suicide rates have traditionally been highest among elderly males, rates among young people have been increasing to such an extent that they are now the group at highest risk in a third of all countries.{from world health organization website}
I already gave you the reason, but that's unsubstantiated. It's a conclusion I've drawn. Over 40 million abortions since 1973, most {99%} of them because it's inconvenient for the mother to bear the child. Many abortions performed at a stage when the baby is capable of survival outside the womb. Have you ever read a detailed description of a partial birth abortion? Often performed in the last month of pregnancy, if that isn't callous indifference to life, I don't know what is.Recently the US infant mortality rate has gone up, and Japan has a lower rate than we do.Of course the ones we legally kill aren't counted.I said irreparable, not irreversible. The trend could be reversed, but the damage to our society is done.

According to your definitions of terms, yes I concede. as long as you maintain that telescopes etc, are necessary. Corneal transplants and corrective lenses are repairs to damaged or deficient eyes. Annie Oakley could hit a quarter thrown into the air with a 22 rifle, without corrected vision.

Are you referring to microevolution? Perhaps we are not on the same page here. I don't consider adaptation {minor changes in animals such as growing a longer thicker coat in a cold climate} to actually be evolution. True, since macro evolution has no evidence to support it, the faithful are calling adaptation and variation within a species, evolution. I've had some tell me that if you breed two different types of dogs together, say a lab and a poodle, the labradoodle you end up with is a new species. If that's true, then every time two mongrel dogs mate sucessfully, a new species is born. My dictionary has two meanings, similar organisms with the capability of interbreeding only among themselves, and, a group having in common certan attributes. Adapt, to become adjusted to a condition or environment. Strangely, I can't find microevolution in the dictionary. Biochemist Ernst Chain, who shared a Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, declared: "To postulate... that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations, or even that nature carries out experiments by trial and error through mutations in order to create living systems better fitted to survive, seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts. ... These classical evolutionary theories are a gross oversimplification of an immensely complex and intricate mass of facts, and it amazes me that they were swallowed so uncritically and readily, and for such a long time, by so many..."
[Ernst Chain, Responsibility and the Scientist in Modern Western Society]
I guess other people more intelligent than I must be making the same mistakes. Funny, I don't remember saying anything like that. So the background radiation that led to the hypothesis of the big bang theory, apparent order instead of chaos in the universe {especially in our solar system}, the impossibility of abiogenesis, the apparent sudden appearance of completely developed complex organisms in the fossil record, and the anomaly of water actually becoming less dense when it freezes, are some of the evidences that I use to infer an intelligent creative force.

I thought that concept was pretty good although I didn't realize that some old dead guy named Aristotle came up with it.

That many transitional forms would have to be found to validate his theory, and later before he died, he predicted that they would be found in abundance. 150 + years later and we're still waiting. Before then, there is no trace in the fossil record of anything apart from single-celled creatures and a few very primitive multicellular ones. All animal phyla emerged completely formed and all at once, in the very short period of time represented by the Cambrian explosion. (Five million years is a very short time in geological terms!)
The fossils found in Cambrian rocks belong to very different creatures, such as snails, trilobites, sponges, jellyfish, starfish, shellfish, etc. Most of the creatures in this layer have complex systems and advanced structures, such as eyes, gills, and circulatory systems, exactly the same as those in modern specimens. These structures are at one and the same time very advanced, and very different.
Richard Monastersky, a staff writer at ScienceNews magazine states the following about the "Cambrian explosion," which is a deathtrap for evolutionary theory:
A half-billion years ago, ...the remarkably complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. This moment, right at the start of Earth's Cambrian Period, some 550 million years ago, marks the evolutionary explosion that filled the seas with the world's first complex creatures.57
The same article also quotes Jan Bergstrm, a paleontologist who studied the early Cambrian deposits in Chengjiang, China, as saying, "The Chengyiang fauna demonstrates that the large animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that they were as distinct from each other as they are today."58 Not at all. But since there is an accumulation of many small changes over an extremely long period of time, wouldn't there be literally thousands of generations, each with many characteristics of the preceeding form and the "improvements" of the new? Also there wouldn't be just one of each type but whole population groups, thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, increasing the probability of preservation by fossilization or tar pits, wouldn't there? This should give us a relatively complete record, not the dozen or so {radically different in form}fossils with huge gaps that are supposed to be evidence of whale evolution. 1 less
2 less and no
3 no effect and should not influence
4 more lkely to reproduce and pass on benefits, same with living offspring
5 example 4 above would apparently have an advantage, but brings up some questions. For example:1 What if the beneficial mutation prevents the organism from breeding with the other, unaffected members of the group? {Appearance radically different as an example} There would then be a much higher likelyhood of the very small population group {only able to mate with siblings or parent} being wiped out.

Are you referring to Archaeopteryx? Hasn’t it definitely, especially with recent research, been found to be a bird? Archaeopteryx had an impressive array of features that immediately identify it as a bird. It had perching feet. Several of its fossils bear the impression of feathers. These feathers were identical to those of modern birds in every respect. The primary feathers of non-flying birds are distinctly different from those of flying birds.And Texas Tech researchers have found bird fossils in rocks that predate Archaeopteryx by 75 million years.It’s sometimes hard for me to accept that some striking evidence has been found due to the instances where outright fakes are accepted by the scientific community, often for many years before being exposed as fakes. Here is a recent one: What about the Colin Paterson quote that no transitional fossils existed? As the curator of one of the largest museums containing at that time more than a million fossils, well after Darwin’s death, wouldn’t he have been well informed about such things?Darwin predicted that the fossil record would show the gradual transition from simple life forms to the complex species that exist today. The Cambrian explosion however, revealed the sudden appearance in the fossil record of mammals, birds, reptiles, etc, already completely developed. Darwin recognized this was a problem for his theory, and predicted that as more fossils were discovered, transitional forms would be found in abundance. Most scientists agree that none exist. With thousands of beneficial mutations over millions of years required for the evolutionary process to take place, there should be at least one relatively complete and obvious record of at least one species transformation into another. And why not orders? According to the theory, elephants evolved from euglena, or their equivalent, didn’t they?By large gaps, I mean that there should be an orderly, logical procession, unambiguous and widely accepted, that does not require interpretation, or speculation.For instance, the whale evolutionary record is usually used as an example of a relatively complete fossil record, yet there are no examples of the walking land mammal to the swimming mammal, and there is even disagreement as to which species is the ancestor of the whale. Robert Carroll acknowledged that it is not even possible to identify a single ancestral species.That is what I call a "large gap".Also I do not give very much credence to species whose provenance is a jaw fragment with three teeth, or one arm bone. Why should I have to do furnish calculations about a well established area of investigation and research?One has only to search for examples and compare the findings. There are many examples of persistent harmful mutations [Parkinson’s, cystic fibrosis, sarcopenia, many cancers, sporadic pulmonary lymphangioleiomyomatosis, and thousands of others] and very few beneficial ones. Why are these harmful ones hanging around for hundreds of years if "most of them spontaneously abort"? One article I read said there are over 4,500 known disease causing mutations.Even the yeast colonies and e coli cultures that supposedly improved through mutations are still yeast and e coli. They have not evolved into different bacteria.Paleontologist Kurt Wise observed:
Of carefully studied mutations, most have been found to be harmful to organisms, and most of the remainder seem to have neither positive nor negative effect. Mutations that are actually beneficial are extraordinarily rare and involve insignificant changes. Mutations seem to be much more degenerative than constructive (2002, p. 163, emp. added).The late Hermann J. Muller, Nobel laureate in genetics, said: Accordingly, the great majority of mutations, certainly well over 99%, are harmful in some way, as is to be expected of the effects of accidental occurrences (1950, 38:35, emp. added).Evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky candidly admitted that favorable mutations amount to less than 1% of all mutations that occur (see Davidheiser, 1969, p. 209). Dr. Dobzhansky even remarked that most mutants which arise in any organism are more or less disadvantageous to their possessors... (1955, p. 105).C.P. Martin, also an evolutionist, wrote in the American Scientist: Accordingly, mutations are more than just sudden changes in heredity; they also affect viability, and, to the best of our knowledge, invariably affect it adversely.This message has been edited by xevolutionist, 03-29-2005 12:55 PM

I can say there is not enough time because of the actual physical evidence, which shows that species are resistant to phenotype changes, self repairing to a large extent on the cellular level, and the infinitesmal positive changes which occur with mutations. The observed evidence shows that species are declining at an alarming rate, not increasing or improving.Genetic diversity within species is a result of combinatations of inherited characteristics. It doesn't take many generations of selective breeding to eliminate the characteristics that you don't want in a dog, for example. Varieties are a result of many factors, interbreeding and loss of genetic information primarily. 6 to 10 thousand years is a very long time. The only reason that the earth's age is proposed to be billions of years is that the ToE requires that as a minimum even under ideal conditions. Of course ToE also requires new genetic information be created where none exists. This doesn't happen in nature.Interestingly, soft tissues were recently discovered inside dinosaur bones! This seems to cast doubt on current dating methods, which say dinos have been extinct how many million years?This from my weekly free science e mail.
"The fossil record contains some spectacular examples of the fossilization
of soft tissues of animals and plants. Usually, and particularly in fossils
more than a few million years old, however, these are preserved as
impressions or by mineralization, for example, in petrified wood. (p. 1952;
see the news story by) now report the remarkable preservation of soft
cellular tissues in the interior of several T. rex and other dinosaur
bones. These include soft, pliable, and translucent blood vessels and
osteocytes associated with collagen in the bones."Science, vol. 307.Of course someone will come up with some explanation how this can occur even after millions of years and the evolutionary faithful will swallow it whole. Faith is a powerful thing indeed.

The hold ups are that 1, the negative mutations are not eliminated except in theory, and 2, the beneficial ones are so negligable in number and clinical effect that they are a non factor. Also, even in beneficial mutations, no additional genetic information appears. The current dna is just corrupted. How then, can we go from euglena to elephant?The current population of the earth is now over 6 billion. If the mutations are random they should be appearing rapidly now as each year is equivalent to 6 billion man/years of evolution. Why are there no babies being born with eagle vision or radiation resistant skin?Apparent beneficial mutations, such as immunity to HIV may come at an as yet unknown cost. Is the immunity due to a change in the vaginal secretions that also attack male spermatozoa? Wouldn't that spread through the population until there was a significant shortage of breeding males? What research has been done to determine the cause of the immunty?

My point was that each person {Hitler, Jeffry Dahmer} is free to determine his own morality. Who determines what are good standards or bad standards? If Hitler is the authority then mass murder is acceptable. If Dahmer is the authority then cannabilism is acceptable. Perhaps. If life is just an accident with no purpose other than to survive, why should I care about the welfare of anyone who doesn't positively affect my needs or desires? If I wanted to kill someone and I thought I could avoid getting caught, why not? Why would I be concerned with laws if I thought I could circumvent them? It's your morality, not laws, that detemine your behavior. As for harmony, we would all get along much better if no one disagreed with me. The actions of individuals indicate their own personal morality or perhaps their lack of sanity. The Bible teaches love and service to God and man. True, God did command some extreme punishments for those civilizations who practiced child sacrifice and witchcraft, also mentioning that attempting to contact the dead was repugnant to Him. Even then He gave them opportunities to repent before their destruction. So whose life had greater meaning? Hitler or mother Teresa? Was it just an excuse to get rid of people he didn't like or did Hitler really believe he was just speeding up the evolutionary process? I doubt this is the right forum to discuss this subject, but once you decide that embryos are not human, that it's legal to kill them right up to minutes before birth, then why stop there? Any individual exhibiting undesirable qualities or lower level function is a candidate for extermination. There is already a case in Texas where a living baby was killed because the doctors told the mother it wouldn't have sufficent quality of life. Killed, by lethal injection, not allowed to die. Who will be making decisions like this for you when you are in a coma? Shall we eliminate all persons with red hair? They usually don't have as good a quality of life as blondes. I read an interesting sci-fi novel where all children who tested above a certain intelligence level were euthanized. they caused too much trouble for society.

As I stated, there is no evidence, it was just an opinion that our society would be better off without the ToE. On the other hand, what positive effect on society has ToE had?

What genetic evidence confirms evolution? I read that Dna investigation indicated that the entire human race shared an ancestry of a very few individuals. That seems to support my theory more than yours.There are currently many brilliant scientists that believe in creation, or intelligent design. For instance, the background radiation which led to the big bang theory, coupled with the evidence that our universe is rapidly expanding, indicates one definite starting point of existence for the universe. It did not always exist. Something must have caused it to exist. There is not enough matter in the universe to support an oscillating universe theory.Almost all solids are denser than their liquid form. Water, which makes life, as we know it, possible, is not. Why does it act in this strange way? We are unable to create one living cell with all the technology available, yet incredibly complex forms of life exist on this planet and most are steadily declining. One conclusion might be that these life forms were planted here by a higher intelligence. If they were self generating, by some type of natural law, there should be more life forms appearing on a regular basis now.The intelligent creative force has always existed.

No, I would consider them drawings, based on an idea, not on evidence. The barrier is that no new genetic information can be produced by mutation. You only corrupt the information already present.Please provide evidence that it does occur.

Yes.