Evidence for Intelligent Design-is there any?

Well, you've already drawn six responses to this post, and here's another. At times I'm just thunderstruck at the sheer degree of perversity of some ideas of creationists, and this one is definitely one of the most perverse. You can get away with this sort of thing in your own enclaves and with fellow travelers like Lucy, but in the real world where people want the straight story you have to say things that are actually true.In this case you're doing a, "Oh, yeah? Well, you do it too!" The problem is, quite obviously we don't. Neither explaining nor researching evolution involves disproving creation; in fact, creation never receives a second thought, not even a first thought, and only comes up when opposing the efforts of creationists. The only place you can find technical papers about evolution that mention creation is at creationism conferences. Even the technical papers of Michael Behe, the founder of the intelligent design movement, do not mention creation.The fact of the matter is that here in yet another thread about the evidence of intelligent design, its proponents can only offer evidence against evolution. This is so obvious a non-starter that most evolutionists cannot fathom why creationists keep trotting it out. The foundation of all of modern science is observational evidence from the natural world, and if evolution ever proves to be an insufficient explanation for the origin of species then science will seek out other natural explanations.The creationist belief that disproof of evolution will cause the scientific world to embrace supernaturalism, or even just accept mechanisms for which there is no evidence, can only be based upon massive self-deception. Just as in the laundry business where it's, "No tickee, no shirtee," in the science business it's, "No evidence, no theory." Intelligent design is just creationism under a new name, as was made so clear at trial in Dover where it was proven that Of Pandas and People had been transformed from a book on creationism into a book on intelligent design by simply replacing the word "creation" with the phrase "intelligent design".In order for the possibility that someone or something other than evolution is causing species change over time to be accepted as a scientific possibility then there should be evidence. As many have already told you, the hallmark of successful theories is successful predictions. Here are some predictions of intelligent design that if found to be true would constitute support for the intelligent design idea, at which time it could finally be accepted as a legitmate hypothesis and would enter into the running in the race to becoming a legitimate theory:

1. Genes should be found that have no apparent predecessors.
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2. In species change happening today, we should find evidence of genetic changes that are completely unrelated to natural mutational mechanisms.
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3. In the fossil record, new innovations should appear suddenly and wholly formed and with no more primitive antecedents.
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4. In the fossil record, new innovations should appear in groups that are completely unrelated.
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5. More generally, we should evidence of processes with no possible naturalistic explanation.

--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Your message is just another recitation of the same old creationist arguments against evolution that have been rebutted time and again. This thread represents an attempt to break out of this pattern. It is supposed to be about the positive evidence for ID.It isn't rocket science to understand that "evidence against evolution" and "evidence for ID" are not synonymous. Please, no more evidence against evolution. There are already tons of threads for that, and if you want to propose a new one then go ahead and I'll promote it as quickly as I can, but in this thread please, please, please stop presenting your evidence against evolution. It's off-topic.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Fix misspeak.

If you'd like to have a discussion about whether ID, creationism and evolution are science, then you should propose a new thread. This thread's topic is about the evidence for ID. In other words, if evidence for ID is not what you want to talk about then you shouldn't be posting here.More generally, you're not posting anything about the topic, and this recent pattern of ID and creationism advocates criticizing evolution in threads about ID and creationism has gone beyond being tiresome. You come into threads like this and post one off-topic message after another about the supposed problems with evolution, and for the most part the evolutionists don't respond because they know it's off-topic, but I'm beginning to think this pattern isn't ignorance but brilliance, a way to without opposition make your points against evolution over and over again.It's important for board moderation to not overreact by making any permanent policy changes. It is frequently the case that this week's hot issue quickly becomes a non-issue as time goes by. But for whatever reason you and Bertot and Beretta are all at the same time posting off-topic criticisms of evolution over and over again that anyone following the Forum Guidelines cannot respond to, so I think board moderation has to get a little stricter for a little while so that this stops.The forums are divided into topics. If you want a place where all topics are mashed together into a single thread then go to Yahoo Groups, but here at EvC Forum please stay on topic.Of course, I'm just a participant in this thread and will take no moderator actions myself, and there's no guarantee that other moderators will agree with me, but at a minimum take this as a plea to please, please, please get on-topic.--Percy

This characterization of Gould's views is incomplete and misleading at best, but it is definitely off-topic. If you want to talk about Gould's views on evolution, indeed, anyone's views on evolution, take it elsewhere. This is uninformed and misleading, but again, please take these criticisms of evolution to a thread where they would be on-topic. This is just out and out wrong, but more to the point, this is as off-topic as everything else so far in your message. Now you're applying criteria inconsistently. No one was there when the "intelligent designer" designed or created, either. But more importantly, you're still off-topic. You've gone through an entire message of fair length without touching once on the topic, the evidence for intelligent design. Congratulations!--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Specified complexity is an unsupported assertion, not evidence. If you don't believe this, then just try finding the evidence used to develop the concept of specified complexity. In particular, find the descriptions of the experiments by which measures of specified complexity were determined, and by which the threshold amount of specified complexity requiring a directing intelligence was determined.In fact, just try finding a way to measure specified complexity.Here's a challenge for you: try to find out what the units of specified complexity are.If you go back to my Message 35 you'll find some suggested examples for where to look to find possible evidence of intelligent design.--Percy

Hi Beretta,What you've been asked repeatedly to avoid is criticism of evolution and/or evolutionists in this thread where evidence for ID is the topic. In this case you're arguing that evolutionists don't accept the argument from design because they don't want to, or perhaps because their world-view doesn't allow them to. It would be equally false for evolutionists to argue that creationists don't accept evolutionary arguments because they don't want to, or perhaps because their world-view doesn't allow them to. Neither argument is scientific nor based upon observational evidence of the natural world.If you want to argue in this way anyway then propose a thread and I will promote it as quickly as I can.But if you'd like to discuss the topic of this thread, then a response to my earlier post would be very different from what you just posted. It would instead address the questions I raised about specified complexity. Specifically, what were the experiments that established a) the measures of specified complexity; b) how to measure specified complexity; and c) the threshold of specified complexity beyond which intelligence is required?These are, of course, rhetorical questions. No such experiments have ever been designed, let alone performed.--Percy

Hi Tony,All ID has going for it is a few interesting ideas:

• Microbiology is replete with irreducibly complex structures that could only have been intelligently designed.
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• Specified complexity requires intelligence.
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• DNA is a code and the genome is information, and only intelligence can create codes and information.

You've brought an additional idea to the table, one IDists are usually loathe to mention because it immediately reveals the religious and unscientific nature of ID: the designer is "a God/great universal creator".It's one thing to have ideas, it's another thing to actually develop them into hypotheses and eventually theories. If the ideas of ID had any correspondence to the real world then they would lead to insights and discoveries beyond the reach of modern science, or at least to ideas as good as modern science, or at least lead to some positive result, but they don't. That's why the vast majority of ID effort is lobbying rather than research.So if irreducible complexity is an idea that leads to greater insights about the natural world, then why has its creator, Michael Behe, written no technical papers about it?And if specified complexity is a real concept, then why is there not only no way to measure it, but no one even working on a way to measure it?And if chemical structures can be codes and can contain information, then how do you tell the difference between a chemical structure created by an intelligence and one created naturally?You see, ID is not going to become science just by claiming to be science. It will only become science by doing science.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

I have four. First, unless you're in the habit of handing out your account name and password to family and friends or have it posted somewhere on the Internet, or until you forget how to use the quoting codes, I think you can safely assume we know that "TONY" wrote this. Second, you're committing the fallacy of argument by analogy. When Robert Burns wrote, "My love is like a red, red rose," he did not mean she had all the qualities of a rose. Obviously his love did not have a pistol or stamen or roots.In the same way, while analogies can obviously be drawn between DNA and software regarding some of its qualities, it is a mistake to conclude it must therefore possess all other qualities of software.IDists make analogy mistakes so consistently that I'm impelled to say more. An analogy is a method of explication, not scientific evidence. It is a way of making something clear and understandable by drawing parallels to something else that is more familiar. But noting similarities between things does not mean those things are equivalent, or that the similarities extend to aspects of these things that have not yet been observed.The number of stupid mistakes you can make by overextending analogies is legion. If someone didn't know what a bat was you could tell him that a bat is like a bird in that it is a mammal that flies. If this person were to make the mistake of overextending the analogy he might reason, "If a bat is like a bird in that it flies, then it must be like a bird in all its other aspects and also have feathers and lay eggs."Or what if someone told you that a black hole is like the whirlpool above a bathtub drain in that it sucks everything in. Would you then conclude that a black hole must be made of water?You're making the same type of mistake. You're noting that DNA possesses some of the qualities of software and then concluding that it must therefore have all the qualities of software. In reality, DNA has the qualities it is observed to have. It is an error of the first order to conclude it must have qualities of other things that it is similar to. Third, you're just repeating the ID claim I already listed in Message 140, that specified complexity requires intelligence. As I already pointed out, this is an unsupported claim with no foundation in any scientific research. It originates with William Dembski who just proposed it out of the blue, and who still has provided no scientific evidence for it, no way to measure it, and of course no way to decide how much specified complexity requires intelligence, not to mention that the definition of intelligence is still scientifically vague.Specified complexity is not a scientific concept. It's no more than an ID talking point raised when making presentations to victims, er, school boards, politicians, and other laypeople. If it were science it would be receiving attention in scientific research. I always love these "I'm objective and you're not" arguments. The obviously and equally fallacious response is, "No, it's your dogmatic belief system that is blinding your eyes from seeing the evidence all around us." So where does the argument go from here? How do we determine whose belief system is more dogmatic and which is more blinding to the eyes? Obviously this can only lead irrelevantly off-topic.What you need to do is seek out the evidence for intelligent design, keeping in mind this time that analogies and unsupported assertions are not evidence.--Percy

It's interesting that you say this, because the contradiction you're introducing is one of the points one makes when explaining why ID is just an idea with no cohesion, consistency, or independent lines of evidence.The argument goes like this: ID would like to have it both ways. When explaining why life must be designed, IDists draw analogies to human designs. When explaining why life is too wondrous to have happened naturally they describe how far beyond human comprehension the complexity of life is. So which is it? Is life something we could design ourselves, or is it far beyond our meager talents.The reality is that the complexity of life is pretty much what one would expect from a process that combines accumulating changes with selection and that operates all the time everywhere around the planet. The degree to which human beings can replicate any of life's processes is irrelevant to the question of how life began and evolved, except as it reflects upon our scientific ability to ferret out the secrets of the universe. Are you 12? Here's another request to address yourself to the topic and not to what you perceive as the personal foibles of your opponents.--Percy

Hi Bio-molecularTony,In many posts you seem to be giving voice to whatever happens to pop into your head at the moment. EvC Forum has a large number of forums, and each forum has many different topics. Could you try to keep your posts in this thread focused on its topic? The topic of this thread is the evidence for ID. You can take the other topics you'd like to discuss (the Law of Biogensis, the illusion of reality, the Higgs Boson, comments by Bill Gates, and how little we really know) to threads where they would be appropriate.Also, 12 of the last 16 messages were posted by you, many of them very short. Threads at EvC Forum are closed after they reach 300 messages and you're using those messages up very quickly. Moderators try to discourage members from posting lots of short messages. You might try to practice some consolidation and think about whether what you're going to say has anything to do with the topic.About your Message 154, it's mostly off-topic, but it's worth noting that you've mischaracterized how science regards the supernatural. Science does not exclude the supernatural. Science doesn't exclude anything. All science requires is that the phenomena it studies produce observable and replicable evidence. Any supernatural phenomena that produce observable and replicable evidence would be considered scientific.So do the processes of ID produce observable and replicable evidence? If the answer is yes then this is the right thread to begin offering that evidence, and we're all wondering when you're going to start? Let me again remind you, analogies and unsupported assertions are not evidence.In your Message 166 you say: And I could reply, "The reality is that it is your own dogmatic belief system that is blinding your eyes from seeing the evidence for evolution all around us." Now what? And how many times are you going to repeat this fallacy? Does it need to be explained again?But this isn't something that should be discussed in this thread, I'm just pointing out the fallacy. If you really want to talk about evolution as a dogmatic belief system (or about anything except the evidence for ID) then you should take it to another thread.Anyway, you go on to say: And then you continue in this vein in Message 168: These two paragraphs are all just a bunch of unsupported assertions and more arguing by analogy fallacies, but your frequent references to God do manage to make very clear the religious nature of ID, which has been our point all along, that ID is religion, not science.Finally in Message 170 you say: If life's processes really involved elements of the supernatural then man couldn't analyze, understand and modify them, could he.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar and spelling.

Long before you ever joined EvC Forum it had a set a rules that we call the Forum Guidelines. You agreed to follow them when you joined.You're free to discuss anything you like at EvC Forum, we just request that you stay on topic in each thread. It's in the Forum Guidelines, rule 2. You agreed to follow them or you wouldn't be here. In this thread we're discussing the evidence for ID. If that's not what you want to discuss then you shouldn't be posting here.The EvC Forum moderator team, of which I'm a member, is committed to maintaining an environment that encourages constructive discussion that actually gets somewhere. Experience has taught us that there are always those who are determined to do whatever they damn well please and hang any rules that might get in the way, and rather than coddle such members with one explanation after another we just suspend them for longer and longer periods until they either go away or are permanently suspended.The thread for bringing problems to the attention of moderators is Windsor castle.Moderators try to refrain from taking moderator actions in threads in which they're participating, but that isn't always possible. Think of a moderator participating in a discussion like a policeman at a football game. If one the players commits a penalty, the policeman is not going to get involved, that's not what he's there for. But if one of the players commits a real crime, say starts rifling the snack bar, then the policeman will step in. In other words, if you get far enough out of hand here I *will* step in.Okay, that's all the help with EvC Forum rules you're going to get. Good luck.About the rest of your post and all those rules that you claim make it impossible for ID to be science, I'm afraid that science had a set of rules and methods long before you were ever born. If ID wants to be thought of as science then ID researchers have to do some actual science. Convincing laypeople who happen to be legislators or school board members that ID is science doesn't make it science. You have to convince other scientists that ID is science. Your frequent invocation of supernatural explanations that have no supporting evidence makes it pretty clear that ID isn't science, it's religion.--Percy