What exactly is ID?

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Oh, it seems that you can communicate after all...

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What exactly have we been doing for the last few hundred posts?

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In other words your attempt to imply that you DIDN'T argue for it was a an attempt to deceive.

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But I never said that. I said that I argued for it, and why. Please stop misrepresenting my position.

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Since we're talking only about individual protein molecules with the same structure, the only difference would be in the regulatory regions. Good luck arguing that the version that leads to 1,000,000 copies is going to be less probable than the version which leads to only 50.

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I'm talking about proteins themselves forming by chance. As for the sequence. The DNA that gets translated to RNA maps nucleic acids to amino acids which are supposed to fold into proteins. Obviously, you will need more RNA for more proteins.

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Dembski's definition is (to be generous to you) -log2 p where p is the probability. The ordinary definition is "complicated". Look up a dictionary if you really want to know more.

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What's the difference?

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I suppose that this is the sort of mathematics we can expect from someone who thinks that a probability can be "50 proteins". But no, there is no contradiction because -log n is NOT proportional to 1/n. (Two variables, a and b, are proportional if there is a constant c such that for all values a = c.b. )

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Let's see...1 - 1/2
2 - 1/4
3 - 1/8
4 - 1/16
5 - 1/32
6 - 1/64
7 - 1/128
8 - 1/256
9 - 1/512etc...As the complexity gets higher, the probability gets smaller. Why do you deny this?

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Well I don't agree because logarithms don't preserve proportionality.

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Let us again see...-log2(1/2) = 1
-log2(1/4) = 2
-log2(1/8) = 3
-log2(1/16) = 4
-log2(1/32) = 5
-log2(1/64) = 6
-log2(1/128) = 7
-log2(1/256) = 8
-log2(1/512) = 9etc...As one gets smaller -log2(x) the other gets larger. Why are you denying this?

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Firstly the entire statistics community does NOT accept Dembski's ideas. If they talk about complexity it is more likely to be Kolmogorov complexity which is a measure of compressibility of a sequence.

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I never said they do. Neither is the principle of insuficcient reason Dembski's idea. And yes, the statistical community does accept it.

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Secondly the entire statistics community know what proportionality is and what a logarithm is and therefore know that you're wrong to say that p is inversely proportional to -log p.

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-log2(1/2) = 1
-log2(1/4) = 2
-log2(1/8) = 3
-log2(1/16) = 4
-log2(1/32) = 5
-log2(1/64) = 6
-log2(1/128) = 7
-log2(1/256) = 8
-log2(1/512) = 9Why do you keep denying this?

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And thirdly the entire statistics community know that simply assigning equal probabilities to different outcomes without knowledge is NOT reliable.

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False. When you apply equal probability to dice, you are making an assumption and using the principle of insufficient reason. So yes, they do use it.

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Except, of course, methodological naturalism doesn't say that supernatural explanations are false. It says that science isn't competent to investigate the supernatural. That's rather a big difference.

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Neither did I say that it says that they are false. But they limit what science can and can not investigate. Explanations are supposed to be materialistic. Which means that an intelligence can not be an answer. If you don't know that the intelligence isn't an answer in the first place, you can't say that you can't say it is. It's a logical fallacy, because a non-material cause could be the right answer. So if I open the investigation to more possible solutions I'm doing the right thing.

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(Your "criticism" also doesn't address the other pragmatic reason for using methodological naturalism - it has been hugely successful).

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Newton's description of gravity did very well also. But it also had to be replaced. Being correct in some instances doesn't mean you are always correct. Science is supposed to be improving itself constantly.

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The probability of getting the exact sequence changes. However if we consider Kolmogorov complexity the complexity depends not on the probability of the sequence, but the sequence itself. Sequences displaying a regular pattern are less complex than those which do not - so the definition of complexity we use is important.

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Currently we are tolking about events. It's the patterns that are described by Kolmogorov complexity.

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Even with Dembski's measure the relevant probability may not change - or it may even increase. That is because the relevant probability is the probability that the specification is met, not the probability of the exact sequence (as in Dembski's analysis of the Caputo case).

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Probability of an event can not increase if you increase complexity.

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That does not put their origin in doubt, nor common ancestry in doubt. I don't see how ERV's evolving function puts evolution and common ancestry in doubt.

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They didn't evolve it. They had it from the start.

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We observe these organisms participitating in HGT. That would seem to be a pretty big hint.

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True. But it could still be that they simply do not share a common ancestor, right?

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That would be your fantasy world. In reality there is a nested hierarchy for metazoans. You continue to dodge this by conflating a lack of a nested hierarchy for all life when prokaryotes are included as a lack of any nested hierarchy for any group.

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Go here. The nested hierarchy for metazoans.

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I see, you are totally clueless about what I'm saying. There is no single constant nested hierarchy.What you provided was instances of nested hierarchy for certain genes. That is a fact. Those instances exist. But what you seem to not understand is that for a full nested hierarchy to be true, >>> ALL <<< genes need to form a nested hierarchy. Not just few of them.I repeat, yes some genes do form a consistent nested hierarchy. But not ALL do. Therefore, there is no nested hierarchy for all metatoans.Here is an example.

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For example, pro-evolution textbooks often tout the Cytochrome C phylogenetic tree as allegedly matching and confirming the traditional phylogeny of many animal groups. This is said to bolster the case for common descent. However, evolutionists cherry pick this example and rarely talk about the Cytochrome B tree, which has striking differences from the classical animal phylogeny. As one article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution stated: the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene implied...an absurd phylogeny of mammals, regardless of the method of tree construction. Cats and whales fell within primates, grouping with simians (monkeys and apes) and strepsirhines (lemurs, bush-babies and lorises) to the exclusion of tarsiers. Cytochrome b is probably the most commonly sequenced gene in vertebrates, making this surprising result even more disconcerting.

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See? Genes like Cytochrome C are always use to show a nested hierarchy within mammals. And yes, it shows a nested hierarchy. But guess what. The cytochrome B does not. It does not for a nested hierarchy that conforms to the one that is formed by morphology. Cats and whales are included in primates if we go by the cytochrome b. This is obviously false, which means there is no such a thing as a full nested hierarchy of all metozoans.[quotePeer reviewed articles please. This is from "New Scientist" which can be horribly inaccurate, not to mention that this is pulled from the DiscoTute which is also known for bending quotes.][/quote]Here is a nice one. The cytochrome b analisys didn't form a group that was expected genetically. It rather formed a group that was spread out geographically.

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Although the cytochrome b phylogeny did not match subspecific classification of the populations, it did yield geographically proximate groups.

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Cytochrome b Phylogeny Does Not Match Subspecific Classification in the Western Terrestrial Garter Snake, Thamnophis elegans

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In contrast analyses with RPB2 and mtSSU sequences placed Tulasnella at the base of the cantharelloid clade. Our attempt to reconstruct a ‘‘supertree’’ from tree topologies resulting from separate analyses that avoided phylogenetic reconstruction problems associated with missing data and/or unalignable sequences proved unsuccessful.

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Mycologia: Vol 114, No 4 (Current issue)And another one claiming that a "supertree" could not be constructed for all teh tested species. Tulasnella did not conform to a morphologic grouping.

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Trees inferred from independent genes display levels of topological incongruence that far exceed that seen in previous data sets analyzed with these species tree methods. We identify differences in phylogenetic results between inference methods that incorporate gene tree incongruence.

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Species Trees from Highly Incongruent Gene Trees in Rice | Systematic Biology | Oxford AcademicAnd one more saying that differneces are bigger than expected, and do not conform to how species are ordered.

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At the individual level, you are right. However, due to sexual recombination individual alleles are selected for at the level of the population.

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But that's AFTER natural selction is done selecting. I'm not talking about the unit of reproduction. I'm talking about the unit of selection. And by that I mean, what gets evaluated by natural selection to go and reproduce itself. It certainly isn't the individual gene, now is it?

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They are found in the same lineage. That inverted retina type eye is found just in the vertebrate lineage. The forward facing retina eye is found in the cephalopod lineage. The compound eye is found in the arthropod lineage. These are lineage specific eyes, just as you would expect from evolution but not from ID.

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But they are not found in one lineage of species where eyes exist. So whereever you find a discrepancy, you select the lineage where it is congruent and call those species one lineage. That's unfalsifiable. And why are we not supposed to find eyes in one lineage if ID is true?

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Can ID explain why every animal with a backbone also has an inverted retina?

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If it didn't have that, what would that mean? Nothing absolutely nothing. You would simply pick some other characteristic and ask me the same question.

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What was stopping a designer from mixing a backbone and a forward facing retina in a single animal?

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Nothing. But why would he have to do it?

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That's a bunch of woo. It has nothing to do with how flagella work, how they are constructed, how they differ from species to species, etc. This has nothing to do with biology at all. It's nothing more than word games.

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You could have just admitted you didn't understand what was said.

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What it shows is that genetic entropy hits a wall. There is a certain point where additional slightly deleterious mutations are strongly selected against, much more so than earlier in the lineage.

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No. It doesn't hit a wall. It declines, it doesn't stop. It can only stop with unrealistic assumptions like infinite population.

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No one is saying that direct ancestry can be proven. What we are saying is that fossil species should have a mixture of characteristics in keeping with the pattern predicted by evolution.

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But evolution doesn't predict anything! You can't predict anything by evolution.Let's say you have a fish. It can evolve to wak on the groun, and it can also evolve to fly. A creature on the ground can evolve to live under water, and it can also evolve to fly. An animal that flies can evolve to go under water, or to walk on the ground. By this reasoning, you have all the bases covered. So any pattern you find in the nature, you can asign it to evolution. Therefore it's unfalsifiable.Even if it wasn't, you can't asign results to causes you don't know they are capable of performing. You never observed evolution of fish to mammals. Therefore, there is nothing to predict. Because you don't know it's even possible.

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As a rough example, we should see fossils with a mixture of basal ape and human characteristics.

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Why? You do know that you just made that up. What are you basing your prediction on? Nothing. If a creature can evolve wings, than there is no reason there was a human-like creature that actually had wings but died-out.

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We should NOT see fossils with a mixture of ape and avian features.

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WHY? You just made this up. You have no reason for this. If reptiles evolved into birds, than there is no reason why ape-like creatures couldn't alos.

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The fact that we only see the mixture of characteristics predicted by the theory of evolution tells us that the theory is on the right track.

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No, it means it's unfalsifiable.

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So what mixture of characteristics does ID predict? Should we or should we not see a mixture of avian and mammal features, and why? Can you tell us?

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ID doesn't deal with that.

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This model predicts that I should not see a frying pan with toothpicks in it, correct? So if I find a frying pan with toothpicks in it then I can conclude that they didn't evolve. See how evolution is falsifiable?

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Wrong. A frying pan with a toothpick evolved independently. It does not falsify evolution. It's convergent evolution.

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We do not claim that things evolved because they are similar. It is the PATTERN of similarity that points to evolution.

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So it's not similarity, it's the pattern of similarity. Yes, basicly, that's similarity. Which is not evidence for evolution. If ti is, than my picutre of frying pans evolving also has a pattern, which indicates a progresssion.

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Also, are you saying that we should NOT see transitional fossils if evolution is true?

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Evolution predicts anything and thus it predicts nothing. Whatever we see is compatible with evolution.

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Hi So,

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to generate a tree like this for real you need to do it systematically

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- decide what the characters are you are analysing (it needs to be quite a few)
- generate a tree using the right methodology

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it would be interesting to see what happens!

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My criticism of this tree is that you've been selective in terms of the kinds of 'vessel' that you're including, and I don't think you'd get the same result if you truly sampled the population of 'vessels' out there. You've chosen some that happen to fit into this tree structure. For example you've chosen silver coffee cups because they could conceivably lead to frying pans, not because they are representative of coffee cups. You've focussed on the 'metal' character of these items.

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Plus this structure is incompatible with the 'dates' of the vessels in the real world. This model claims that frying pans evolved from silver coffee cups. Have you cross-checked that with the origin dates of silver coffee cups and frying pans? If your model is correct, that cross-reference should hold up. It won't.

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Plus I don't think you've used enough characters in your analysis.

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Trust me, my tree rules.

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This is funny!

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We SEE ervs being formed now in Koalas as an infectious strain endogenises
We SEE that ervs resemble virus genes in various kinds of virus groups
We SEE that 8-9% of our genome is occupied by these viral remnants, degraded to various extents.
We SEE that the sequences of many of these ervs do not appear to be under selective control, and correlate with other measures of species divergence.
We SEE that some of these genes have functions, eg syncytin, but that most don't appear to
We now see that non-retroviruses can also be endogenised - and interestingly, the first ones to have been found are viruses where the virus genetic material is often located very close to the host DNA.

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We are expected to believe that the best way God could have thought of to control genes is to used mashed up and degraded copies of viruses.

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and this is science?

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Can you show me where I exactly asigned God as a cause here?Anyway, the point is that those sequences have functions. They are there for a reason. They are not simply random infections.

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Because your arguments are based on fantasy, false analogies, logical fallacies, your personal opinions and your assumption/s that your personal worldview is an accurate representation of the reality, all the while refusing to validate it against reality.

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Please name me those fantasies, false analogies, logical fallacies etc...

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If anyone needs any proof of this they can just read your latest post and realize that you are claiming that it is possible for cups to breed and produce offspring with hereditary variation, and that because of this logical fallacy (which you seem to regard as a "fact" in your fantasy world), that it is not logical to conclude that this diagram represents successive generations of related organisms:

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You misunderstood me. My image was supposed to be irony. Obviously frying pans did not evolve from cups.You are the one who claimed that similarity is evidence for evolution. I claimed that it's not. Than I made that picture and you said that it does not show evolution, because frying pans do not reproduce.Now think about it for a minute.Animals are similar. Frying pans and cups are similar. Animal similarity is evidence of their evolution. But, similarity of frying pans and cups is not evidence of their evolution.We have a contradiction here.What's teh contradiction? Well it seems that similarity is evidece for evolution in one case, but not in another. Obviously that means that similarity inself is not evidence for evolution.So the point is, if similarity itself is not evidence for evolution, and we saw it's not in the case of frying pans, why would you think that it's evidence for animal evolution?

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And further, you appear to be claiming that we cannot even logically conclude that fossil bones at the same level can be related.

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How would you do that? I showed you bones A and B in previous post. How would you show that they were related and or had offspring?

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Curiously, in the real world, paleontologists can and due tell whether female bones show the effects of childbearing. Once again your opinion is at odds with reality.

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Did this fish have any offspring? Did it's offspring live to reproduce?

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Curiously, this just proves that your opinion is indeed incapable of affecting reality. Logical conclusions are not facts, they are constructs, and they can only be valid if (a) the premises are valid, and (b) the construction is valid. Even if the conclusions are valid they do not become fact.

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They are logical facts. For an exampleIF A = B THAN B = A.This is a logical fact.

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... is not a fact, nor is it a valid logical conclusion, it is an assumption that you have made based on your opinion about reality. Your opinion is not fact, and any conclusion based on it is not, cannot be, fact.

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Than please do stop wasting my time, and show me where is the evidence that any of the fossils had any offspring.

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Just for comparison on what reasonable conclusions that can be reached from the evidence,

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* you look at the diagram above and say that one cannot reasonably infer that a single bone is related to another fossil bone at any level.
* I look at the diagram above and say that any person who claims that ancestry cannot be logically and rationally inferred from evidence like this is not just smoking ignorance, but holding firmly onto delusion.
* you look at the diagram above and say that one could assume that the layers were laid down in "5 minutes of rapid layer deposition due to a catastrophe" ... without any evidence of such catastrophe.
* I look at the diagram above and say that one can assume deposition of layers seen in the diagram occurred in the same manner that we see such layers being deposited today, because there is no evidence of any catastrophe in the data, and no known catastrophe that could produce the same results sorted by layer and arranged by phenotypic groups.

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1.) Exactly.2.) That's becasue you don't know what you're talking about.3.) I never said that it did form in 5 minutes. I said that it could have. That is also a possibility. Becasue that's how rapid layer deposition is brought about. It could have been in 10 minutes, 1 day, 100 days 1000 years, 5 million years, 20 million years etc... I never said that it actually happened in 5 minutes. Unlike you who said it did happen in 5 million years.4.) This is were you go wrong. For the billionth time. We don't see such layers deposited over the period of 5 million years. You never had 5 million years to test that. Now, I'm not saying that it didn't happen. I'm jsut saying that you don't know.Second. We do know that rapid deposition exists. We can't show any evidence of a catastrophe. There is no way to show that a deposition was slow or rapid. So you can't say that I need evidence for it. Becasue if I did, you would also need evidence that it was slow. Which you do not provide.Third, animals are not sorted by their phenotypic groups. They are simply sorted out. You are the one who is imposing that pattern on them. They are simply a bunch of bones in the ground.

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Here we have you inconsistently claiming that (a) you cannot form any logical conclusions from the evidence available, but that (b) you can form a logical conclusion from a lack of evidence.

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How exactly did I do that?

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By comparison, in both cases I've claimed that you can form reasonable, valid and logical conclusions that are consistent with the evidence.

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And you failed. Becasue you still didn't show how you can tell which bones in the ground you find are related.

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The evidence from uranium halos show that this is a reasonable, valid and logical conclusion from the evidence.

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Please explain how.

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The lack of curiosity exhibited by the ID community concerning the designer and his design techniques is very strange. Somehow, knowing nothing about the designer or his techniques, you're nonetheless certain that learning anything about either one is impossible.

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No it's not becasue they simply don't deal with that. Why don't evolutionists deal with the origin of life?

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Things that actually happen leave behind evidence. We can examine DNA of different species and figure out the structure of the nested hierarchy of relatedness.

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No, we can't. Not all genes for a nested hierarchy.

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Why can't IDists examine DNA and figure out how the designer designed?

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Why can't evolutionists examine DNA and tell us how life came about?

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Doesn't the nature and position and timing and effects of a mutation tell us anything about how the designer put that mutation there?

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Who said the designer puts the mutations there?

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So where are the mountains of research demonstrating that the designer and the way he designed are things we cannot know?

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Why would there be such a thing? I never said that we possibly can't know. I'm simply saying that using the method of design detection, we can't know anything about the designer. If somebody invents a method for detecting the designer, and his identity, than we will know. But ID doesn't deal with that. And it doesn't claim that it has any method for that.

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You can insist all you like that these are things impossible to know, but without a foundation of research demonstrating that this is so it sounds like a claim intended to deflect attention away from the infinite regression that can only end at God thereby demonstrating the religious nature of ID.

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But I never claimed that. I simply claimet that there is no method for doing that right now.

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Moreover, this unevidenced claim about the designer and the way he designed is unlike anything in science. Darwin didn't say about evolution that it's impossible to know how nature evolved adaptations. Geneticists didn't say it's impossible to know how genomes are changed over time.

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Neitehr am I saying that it's impossible to know who the designer is. I'm simply saying ID has no method for doing that, neither is trying to produce one. It's only concerned with design detection.

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IDists individually and as a group can dig in their heels and maintain this claim if they like, but it's just too-obvious flim-flam from the perspective of science. Like the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz you're commanding, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," when that's precisely where everyone should be directing their attention.

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Except, nobody is claiming that.You think it's possible to detect the identity of the designer simply by looking at the design? Fine, if you have such a method, than show us. Who designed this ball? What's his identity?

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That is not what the evidence demonstrates. The evidence demonstrates that these sequences started out as a retrovirus that then inserted into the genome. That these DNA sequences acquired function after this event casts no doubt on their origin.

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Please do explain how do you know that.

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And as it stands, ID still can't explain orthology, divergence of LTR's, or divergence of overall ERV sequence between species. They somehow think that pointing to some function in some ERV's somehow makes the phylogenetic signal go away. It doesn't.

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Neither can evolution explain the origin of life, so? The goal of ID is not to explain orthology or homology, but to detect design.

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These are retroviruses that randomly inserted into these genomes. The only explanation for finding the same retroviral insertion at the same spot in two genomes is a single insertion in a common ancestor. The LTR divergence and overall ERV divergence back this up. Can ID explain why the long tandem repeats of an ERV are more divergent if the ERV is shared by all apes than in an ERV shared by just chimps and humans? No, it can't. Evolution can explain this, and it is predicted by the theory.

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Or, a better explanation is that ERVs inserted themseleves there because they were designed to do so. You see, there are things liek mutational hotspots. Some parts of genome mutate more than others. So it would be reasonable that teh ERVs were designed to insert themselves there, and not in some other place.

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Common ancestry is the only thing that can explain shared metabolic pathways and shared genetic systems.

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You didn't even show that universal common descent is possible. You first have to demonstrate that an explanation has the paower to perform an event you are trying to explain. You didn't even demonstrate that universal common descent can do that, so there is no reason to believe that common descent was the cause.You do realize that everything we see could have just poofed into existane 3 minutes ago in the state we see it now? This explanation is quite compatible with what we observe, yet nobody would reasonably propose it. Why? Because we have no evidence for it.

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If you found an organism that did not use the same codons or metabolic pathways I would happily admit that this organism does not share a common ancestor with the rest of known life.

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Why? If evolution evolved one genetic code, why not another?

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Actually, that's not true. What you are looking for is the signal. There will always be noise in any phylogenetic tree, especially given the vast distances between the existing branches. This is unavoidable due to the large distances between branches. This noise is called homoplasy. This is a well known effect that all geneticists are aware of. What geneticists look for is the overwhelming signal, and that overwhelming signal is a nested hierarchy.

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And this is precisely why CD fails. It's not falisifiable. This is the problem. You claim that homology implies nested hierarchy, which means CD. Than you claim that homoplasy implies noise in the nested hierarchy, which also means CD. Basicly whay you are saying is that an event A and the event which is NOT A, implies the same thing. That's like saying that it will either rain (A), or it will not rain (~A) tommorow. Since you predicted one thing and it's opposite, you predicted both, and thus said nothing. This is an unfalisifiable statement. Homology together with homoplasy is unfalsifiable. Because when you find homology you conclude CD, yet when you find it's opposite, you infer noise, and thus conclude CD. This is unfalsifiable.

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Peer review please. Sorry, but the DiscoTute is infamous for pulling quotes way out of context.

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No problem.

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Three observations generally hold true across metazoan datasets that indicate the pervasive influence of homoplasy at these evolutionary depths. First, a large fraction of single genes produce phylogenies of poor quality. For example, Wolf and colleagues [9] omitted 35% of single genes from their data matrix, because those genes produced phylogenies at odds with conventional wisdom (Figure 2D). Second, in all studies, a large fraction of charactersgenes, PICs or RGCsdisagree with the optimal phylogeny, indicating the existence of serious conflict in the DNA record. For example, the majority of PICs conflict with the optimal topology in the Dopazo and Dopazo study [10]. Third, the conflict among these and other studies in metazoan phylogenetics [11,12] is occurring at very high taxonomic levelsabove or at the phylum level.

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http://www.plosbiology.org/article/infooi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0040352The author says the following:1.) Results are cherry picked to conform to the standard phylogeny. When results are at odds, they are simply rejected. Thus to make a certain group of metozoans fit another, 35% of data was excluded.2.) A vast amount of characteristics in a certains tudy has shown to be at odds. Including genes, PICs and RGCs.3.) This problem is pervasive and is happening in the metozoan population, above the phylum taxa. Therefroe, you got a big problem.

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These are subspecies. This is variation WITHIN a species.

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Yes, and they don't fit, now if they don't fit the standard picture, why in teh world would you think that at the level above subspecies would be consistent?

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I keep saying that metazoans fall into a nested hierarchy, and then you quote a paper that deals with fungi. Go figure.

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I'm just saying...

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Yes, after selection is done to the WHOLE POPULATION. In order for gene frequencies to change YOU NEED A POPULATION. That population will have a mixed genetic background. If a gene confers an advantage then that gene will be seen at a higher frequency for each generation IN THE POPULATION.

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I'm not talking about the population. I'm talking about the individual. When the individual is evaluated, is his entire genome evaluated overall, or is his every gene evaluated one by one by natural selection?

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Each lineage has a different type of eye. Each lineage has a LINEAGE SPECIFIC EYE. You might as well cite insect wings and bat wings as homologous structures. These eyes are NOT homologous structures. They are analogous structures. The cephalopod eye and the vertebrate eye are not homologous. They are analogous. They us different ennervation, different developmental pathways, and different cell types in the retina. The only similarity is in their overall shape which is limited by function to begin with. Do you understand the difference? Are you also going to claim that an insect leg and a mammalian leg are homologous simply because you can call them both legs? Is that the length of your phylogenetic analyses, the ability of the English language to describe two structures?

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As I said above. This is unfalsifiable. If a trait is homologous, you will calim that it had an origin from a single lineage. Now, if you claim it's analogous, you will claim that it simply evolved from more than one lineage. This is unfalsifiable.

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Really? That's your argument? You put words in my mouth and consider that an answer? How dishonest is that?

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What's dishonest about it?

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Imagine if you were a defense lawyer in a murder case. "Your Honor, if my client's fingerprints were NOT at the crime scene you would just invent some other evidence, so I call for the dismissal of the fingerprint evidence." Do you think that would work? Do you really believe that this is a rational or logical argument?

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So I will ask again. How does ID explain the fact that an inverted retina is only found in animals with a backbone? Can you answer this or not? Or is this another item that ID is incapable of even approaching?

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So what if it is only found there? What does that mean except that is found there?

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So you are saying that if humans evolved from a common ancestor with chimps that the theory does not predict that we should find a fossil with a mixture of human and basal ape features? Really? Are you really serious with this?

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Yes. Because if humans did evolve from ape-like ancestors, they could have gained and lost any imaginable traits. With enough time, they would look nothing like their ancestors. What would stop people from evolving wings right now? And after some time losing them?

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Convergent evolution does not produce homologous structures. A toothpick of the exact same nature in both lineages but not in the common ancestor would be a violation. It is falsifiable.

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No it's not. You would than call it an analogous structure. It's not falsifiable.

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So what is stopping a designer from putting a toothpick in a frying pan? Care to explain?

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Only himself.

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No, it isn't. Life could have shared similarities that didn't fall into a nested hierarchy.

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And it does have that. You yourself say it's called hooplasy.

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In fact, humans do it all of the time in genetically modified organisms. If you can't distinguish between similarities and a pattern of similarities then you really can't make any arguments against evolution.

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Tell me the difference.

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That's a lie, as I have already shown.

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Why exactly are you accusing me of lying? It's one thing to claim I'm wrong, but another that I'm lying.

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A bird with a mammalian middle ear would falsify evolution.

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Why? Explain why in detail.

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According to ID, why don't we see a living of fossil species with feathers and three middle ear bones? Or is this another fact that ID can't explain?

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Because they weren't designed that way.

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"Evolutionists" do deal with the origin of life, they just don't use the theory of evolution to do so.

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This means that evolution can't explain the origin of life.

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IDists claim that biodiversity is due to intelligent design. Part of that biodiversity is biogeography. It is firmly in the wheelhouse of ID, and they refuse to explain it. Well, actually they could explain it, but then they would have to admit that magical poofing is the mechanism of choice.

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Um... no. That's not what ID is about. It's simply aout detecting design. If you refuse to accept that, than I can't help you.

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Isn't it funny how ID supporters immediatly start talking about evolution when they are asked for an ID explanation? Can you give us the ID explanation or not?

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That's because I'm trying to demonstrate a logical fallacy you are making. There is no such an ID explanation. Just as there is no evolutionary explanation for the origin of life?

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His identity is "an Adidas employee".

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That's not an identity. Imagine if we were int eh court of law, and you say: "Your honor, I solved the case! The killer is an Adidas employee!" Excuse, is the judge supposed to punish the whole company? That's in NOT an identity. Something that explicitly identifies a single person is the identity, or a group is the identity. Something like, first, last name and address.

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The big "Adidas" on the front kind of gives it away.

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Umm... no it doesn't. How do you know it's not a forgery? You do know that there are people who do these things and sell them cheaply? You don't know if that is a product from the Adidas company.

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Even more, we can look at the holes in the seams to determine how they were made, look at the thread and deduce how it was made, and look at all of the materials and come to some very strong conclusioons as to the steps involved in constructing the ball.

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Such as?

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So where are these same ID explanations for how life was made?

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These? What these are you talking about? You explained nothing. The only thing we can infer is that the ball was designed.

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We don't need to know if the fish had any offspring or even any ancestors in order to test the theory of evolution. What we need is the mixture of characteristics found in the fish, and those are quite apparent.

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If a fish can lose and gain any charateristic, than no characteristic is a good prediction. Becasue you don't know if it's going to lose it or gain it.

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Does the fish have a mixture of fish and mammalian features? Nope. Evolution passes.

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Yes it does. Fish have eyes, humans have eyes.Besides, what are fish characteristics, and what are mammalian characteristics?

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Can you tell us, using ID, what mixtures of characteristics we should not see in fossils and why?

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ID makes no predictions about that.Edited by Smooth Operator, : No reason given.

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You implied it, as is perfectly obvious.

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I implied what?

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But they don't.

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Oh, but I know that very well. It is you who is claiming that they evolved, thus they formed by the exact probability as with random chance.[quoteEven if you do (and I have to say that I am far from certain that is true) it still doesn't matter because the sequence is dictated by the gene.][/quote]Is the sequence dictated by itself? No it's not. The gene is the sequence, and the sequence is the gene. It can't direct itself.

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Simple things can be improbable, too.

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For instance?

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I didn't. I denied that the relationship was inversely proportional - and your list proves me correct.

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Please define the words "proportional" and "inversely proportional".And now tell me does this list show you proportional relationship, or inversely proportional relationship.1 - 60
10 - 6
15 - 4
30 - 2
45 - 1 1/3
60 - 1http://intermath.coe.uga.edu/topics/nmcncept/ratios/a22.htm

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Frequentists don't accept ANY probability based purely on a priori considerations. And nobody who understands probability theory thinks that you can get an accurate result just by assuming that the outcomes are equiprobable without information. It wouldn't even work for something as simple as the sum of two dice.

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Fine, than please do give me a better method. I'm waiting. If you don't have it, we'll keep using mine.

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Based on knowledge, not on ignorance. (And a fequentist would insist on rolling the die to be sure that it was fair).

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Wrong! It precisely says that based on us NOT KNOWING THE LAWS OF MECHANICS IN FULL, we infer uniform probability.Yes it would and it's used like that. Why do you keep denying that? I already showed you this.

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A symmetric die has n faces, arbitrarily labeled from 1 to n. Ordinary cubical dice have n = 6 faces, although symmetric dice with different numbers of faces can be constructed; see dice. We assume that the die must land on one face or another, and there are no other possible outcomes. Applying the principle of indifference, we assign each of the possible outcomes a probability of 1/n.

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As with coins, it is assumed that the initial conditions of throwing the dice are not known with enough precision to predict the outcome according to the laws of mechanics. Dice are typically thrown so as to bounce on a table or other surface. This interaction makes prediction of the outcome much more difficult.

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Principle of indifference - Wikipedia

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And you're wrong again. Methodological naturalism doesn't rule out intelligence at all. All it says is that science can't investigate the supernatural.

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When I say methodological naturalism, I mean the today's version of implied materialim. Since intelligence is non-material, than intelligence can't be an explanation.

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However, abandoning a successful strategy to return to a failed alternative is hardly an improvement.

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Failed? Failed how? Return? Return how? It's not failed, and it's still in use.For instance in cosmology. You do know that by definition the idea of Big Bang and multiverse are not naturalistic because they imply something outside of nature, thus are by definition supernatural. It's just that there are certain people who would like to impose artificial constraints on scientific fields such as biology to adhere strictly to materialism and methodological naturalism.

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The Caputo case was both. A protein is both, Your examples are both. They are not so distinct.

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False on all three accounts. KC has nothing to do with Shannon. My example had on algorithmic compression. Where did I use it? Nowhere. I only used Shannon's method to calculate the complexity from the probability, not KC method.

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Which is why I am correct to say that the length of the sequence does not dictate the complexity.

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Wrong. What I said means that it doesn't increase because it decreases! It can't do both in the same time. It decreases, that's why it's inversely proportional.

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You seem to be a bit lost. The question is why IDists claim it isn't possible to know anything about the designer or how he designed. Can you name any legitimate field of science that makes an analogous claim in the absence of supporting evidence? You can't, right? So where is the research demonstrating that the designer and the way he designed are things we cannot know?

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SETI. They never claimed to know the identity of extraterestrials from whose signals they would infer design.

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As an example, biologists take our knowledge of DNA and RNA from modern cells and apply it in attempts at unraveling the mystery of life's origin. Why can't IDists do something similar for the designer?

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Because design des not get you to a designer. There is no such a method that would get you from a design to a designer.

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If this is the question you truly meant to ask, then the answer is obvious. Almost all investigators into the origin of life are evolutionists, so the answer is that evolutionists do deal with the origin of life. And evolutionists on this board discuss abiogenesis all the time. Like right now.

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But I think the question you meant to ask is why evolution and abiogenesis are considered separate fields within biology. I think the main reason is because evolution deals with life processes that can be directly observed and about which we've developed a fair understanding, while abiogenesis deals with non-life processes that aren't at all well understood or even identified.

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Exactly. They are two different fields of science. Just liek detecting design and detecting the designer would be.

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You evidently lost track of the original question after I restated it in abbreviated form a couple times later in my post. The criticism of ID isn't that it doesn't know how the designer designed. The criticism is that ID claims it isn't possible to know how the designer designed.

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Fromt eh design itself. Because we have no such method. That is why your criticism is flawed. ID doesn't even try to do that.

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Not knowing something is the standard situation in science. This will be as true for abiogenesis as it is for ID. But abiogenesis researchers study the available evidence as they attempt to unravel the mystery, including the structure of DNA. Knowledge about DNA is essential because whatever processes took place in the early history of life, their end result obviously had to include DNA.

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ID researchers could do the same thing. They could take what we know about DNA to inform their studies of how the designer designed. But they don't do that. They just say, "This is irreducibly complex and has complex specified information, therefore it was designed and that's all we can know. Further investigation would be fruitless."

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Than scientists who study abiogenesis should alos deal with geology, math, electronics etc... Yet they don't. Why? Because it's not their job. Their job is to research abiogenesis, and not anything else.The same goes for ID, their research is based on detecting design, and nothign else. If you are so interested in the identity of the designer, than go and form a new branch of science that deals with that.

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Well, then how do mutations happen? By evolutionary processes? That kind of leaves ID with nothing to do, since without mutations no species can ever split off into a different species. Or do you believe that each species was an act of special creation, which is actually just your old time creationism.

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LOL, what? mmutations happen by evolutionary mechanisms? no, you have it wrong. Evolution presupposes mutations. Mutations are the evolutionary mechanism, not the other way around.Even if all life is the product of random mutations acted on by natural selection, that still doesn't mean that there is no place for ID. The question still remains where did the information, that was put in the genomes of living organisms, originally come from. Not that I think that happened. I personally think that design was implemented somewhere around the level of genera or family level. Not that taxonomy is able to accurately classify animals in the first place, but it's an approximation.

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Yeah, well, but you're creating your own eclectic definition of ID that has nothing to do with how IDists like Behe and Dembski from the Discovery Institute define it. This is an artifact of your tendency to argue in whatever way is expedient at the time, rather than in a way that is both internally and externally consistent.

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I define ID just like Dembski does.For instance, following the Discovery Institute's guidance the Dover school board produced this fairly poor (because of its focus on the origin of life) but now well known definition:[/quote]You are confusing the science of ID, and the theory of ID. ID is the science of design detection. If design is detected in a certain object, than we have a theory. We can have a theory of biological design, or of cosmic design etc... Like the fine tuning argument.Intelligent Design Network – Seeking Objectivity in Origins Science

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In a broader sense, Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection -- how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose.

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This is simply a science of intellignet design.

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The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.

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This is the theory of ID in biology.

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It would seem that the Discovery Institute disagrees with you that ID is nothing more than design detection that has no bearing on evolution.

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No it doesn't. It claims that the theory of ID in biology claims that certain features are best explained by design. Since design was detected in living organisms, and evolutionary theory directly contradicts ID, it's obviously that the theroy of ID is in direct conflict with the darwinian explanation, which claims that there is such a thing as a design without a designer.This has nothing to do with the science of ID itself. This is basicly applied ID you are talking about. The same can go for things we see in cosmology, archeology data encryption etc...

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If you're going to insist on slicing and dicing arguments into individual sentences then you're going to continue losing the sense of the arguments being made. The central question is why IDists insist that we cannot know anything about the nature of the designer or how he designed. Sometimes I express this in shortened form and inquire about the identity of the designer, but it's the same question. I don't want to know that the designer was Frank Smith at 511 Main Street. I just want to know why IDists think it's impossible to know anything about the designer.

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Because there is no such a method. If you have one, please do present it.

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Even evolutionists have no trouble taking the existence of a designer as a starting premise and reaching conclusions about him/her/it/them. Obviously the designer chose to design with biological materials. And he designed in a nested hierarchy (something I know you reject but which is acknowledged by the Discovery Institute who knows a bit more about ID than you do (heck, even evolutionists know more about ID than you do), see http://www.evolutionnews.org/...g_the_orchard_model_and.html). And we know something about the location of the designer. He has to be on or somewhere near planet Earth.

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The articel actually goes against the view that there is one single nested hierarchy. The article agrees with me. I'm also claimeing that you can create few nested hierarchies with some genes, but than in turn not with others. The article says the same thing.

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And so your misconceived example of the identity of the designer of the soccer ball completely misses the point. No one is asking you to identify a specific entity as the designer. But just as we can examine the soccer ball and determine the manufacturer, and we can then go the manufacturer and determine who or which team designed that soccer ball, and we can find references to soccer balls in history to find the origins of the first soccer balls. We're not looking for a specific individual, we're just trying to figure out as much as we can about the designers of the soccer ball. There are probably very old soccer balls hidden in attics and museums that would inform the investigation.

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The problem in this case is that we have no such things. How do you intend to ind anything about the designer apart from the living organisms themselves? WHo are you going to visit to ask about the designer?Oh, and no, you can't determine teh manufacturer from the ball. Maybe it's a cheap forgery for the black market.

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But IDists insist that there's nothing we can know about the nature of the designer, which is just a smokescreen for the infinite regression that leads to God. And IDists like Dembski and Behe concede that they believe the designer is God. You're caught still maintaining the smokescreen after the jig is already up.

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Please, if you choose to reply, do not respond to individual sentences. My arguments span multiple sentences and paragraphs. Please respond to the arguments. If you quote more than two or three times from this message then you're missing the arguments and responding to sentences.

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1.) Who claimed there is no way we can know anything about the designer?2.) What smokescreen are you talking about?3.) What infinite regress are you talking about?4.) What jig are you talking about? Have people like Dembski and Behe ever claimed that they didn't believe the designer was the God of the Bible? Did I ever claim they denied it? Did I specifically say that that is actually what they believed? Did I also not say that their personal belief has nothing to do with their science?

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One is your claim that cups and frying pans show the same patterns as evolution

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Which they do.

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in spite of the facts that (a) they are not breeding organisms, (b) they have no hereditary traits, and (c) there is no selection process that makes survival and breeding of one more likely to be passed on to later generations than the other.

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Which is true, and has NOTHING, and I do mean NOTHING whatsoever to do with the fact that they exhibit those patterns.My point war rather that in spite not having all those traits, they still exhibit a pattern of similarity. Which means that a pattern of similarity can exist apart from common descent and evolution.

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That is why it is a false analogy.

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Umm... no. It's a valid analogy, you just didn't get it.Your point was to show that such similarities are due to CD. My point was to show that they exist apart from CD. I made that quite clear.

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Your assumption that it does represent evolution is one of your fantasies.

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You misunderstood me. It DOESN'T represent evolution. That's the point. It just looks that way. It has the same pattern of similarity you claim the animals have. And therefore, you infer CD. Yet I have shown you that the same pattern can be found which is not due to CD.

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Likewise, your claim that because we cannot absolutely positively know something that we therefore cannot infer anything is one of your logical fallacies.

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Which is something I never said. Why do you keep misrepresenting me? I specificaly said that since we can't observe something, we should infer something about it from present evidece that we can observe. And I said it few posts ago.

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But this is the problem. You dont' know that. You assume that. I know that it was supposed to have happened a long time ago, so we have no video tape showing us what happened. I know that. So I'm not asking you for that. But what I am asking you for is evidence that such things as aligators and bears being one speices and than splitting off. What's the evidence that this is even possible? What is teh evidence today, from which we can extrapolate in the past? Simply having assumptions that it can and it did happen is not evidnece. I need observable evidence.

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EvC Forum: Message PeekI said that. I specifically said that if we don't know that soemthing actually happened, than we should infer it. I never said we can't infer it. Please, tell me why do you keep misrepresenting me?

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What contradiction?

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This contradiction. In one case you claim that similarity implies CD. In another case you say that similarity does not imply CD. You have a contradiction. You have a variable A (similarity) that in one instance (animals) produces B (common descent), and in another instance (frying pans), this same variable produces ~B (not-B). Therefore, you have a contradiction.Either it does imply it, or it doesn't. If it does than that would mean that similarity between frying pans means they evolved. Since this isn't ture. That also means that their similarity does not imply that they evolved. And since their similaritydoes not imply they evolved, neither does animal's similarity imply they evolved.

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You yourself said "frying pans do not reproduce" and that is one of several reasons why it is a false analogy.

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It's not a false analogy. A false analogy is when you compare something that can not be compared. I compared the patternt of similarity between your picture, and my picutre. There is no reason I can't do that. Frying pans not being able to reproduce is no reason why I can't compare them.

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There is no evidence of the change in hereditary traits in breeding populations from generation to generation in response to ecological opportunity in the inanimate objects: they don't have hereditary traits, they do not have breeding populations, they do not have generations, they do not have ecological opportunities, they do not have selection mechanisms, so they cannot be analogous to organisms that do possess these elements of biological life.

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But they are not the topic at hand. Their similarity is. And they are both similar. Plus, even if I were to agree with you, the ability that the animals have, still does not imply CD.

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We also see evolution in living breeding populations today, including speciation events, and we can compare the trends and tendencies seen in the living world with the evidence we see in the fossil record.

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1.) For starters, define evolution.2.) Speciation simply means that one population does not interbreed with the other anymore. This does not imply that polar bears and horses are related.3.) The fossil record is a buch of bones in teh dirt. You can't infer evolution form it, because you don't know that any of those animals are related.

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Here you are (intentionally?) confusing and conflating what we can know with absolute truth with what we can logically infer from the evidence. This is a logically false argument (what a surprise eh?).

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I simply asked you, do you knwo if the fish had any offspring.

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Is it logical to infer that the population of this species of fish (including the parents of this fish) produced no offspring? Or does your fantasy extend to propose instant de novo creation of individual fossils?

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I'd go wit the extrapolation that these fish had probably had offspring. Since we see fish today have the same thing.

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Once again, you are (intentionally?) confusing and conflating what we can know with absolute truth with what we can logically infer from the evidence. Curious how so much of your arguments depends on logical fallacies eh?

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I simply asked you a question. Where is the fallacy?

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Obviously one cannot show that two randomly chosen bones, presented devoid of any context or knowledge of where they came from, are related, but this does not mean that one cannot logically infer that fossils, found and cataloged with full context, in close proximity, with multitudinous homologies from level to level, and consistent geological stratigraphy, as in the case with Pelycodus, are related.

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Well fine than! Please than do exactly that. Explain how you would show me that two fossils are related on your picture you presented.

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And when the differences from level to level are less than the overall differences we see within the dog species (just for example), then it is not logical to claim that one cannot infer that they are related.

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You don't know how different they are. ou simply see their fossils. You don't see their DNA. Animals can be very similar compared to their morphology, but genetically very different. So no interbreeding could take place.

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Now you are equivocating. Small surprise. What you claimed was that it was as logical to infer that the deposit was made in 5 minutes, involving unrelated organisms in a catastrophic event, than to conclude that the pattern is due to evolution, hereditary relationships, and normal geological processes.

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No. I never said that. I said that it could have happened. Not that it did happen in 5 minutes.

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Interestingly, it is the scientific evidence that shows that it happened over a
5 million year period:

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What? Which part of that link actually showed us it happened in 5 million years?

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Curiously, I'll trust the evidence over your opinion that is based on denial, fantasy and logical fallacies, especially when you have no evidence for a single element of your claims. I can link you to the original PDF from Gingrich if you are interested.

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What I would like is you to quote me where it says that that fossil record happened in 5 million years. And please quote the explanation of how they came up with that number.

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What you said was that it is not logical to infer that they are related, and then set up some imaginary scenarios based on fantasy and denial that have nothing to do with the evidence, and claim that they are equally logical conclusions. They aren't, because your proposed scenario is not supported by any evidence, while the evidence of hereditary relationships is supported by the evidence.

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Those animals simply got burried by a catastrophe? What's so fantastic about that? Layers and fossils form that way. Here is an example of Mt. St. Helens. It's layers formed in just that fashion.http://www.creationism.org/articles/nelson1.htm

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1. Mountain rearranged beyond recognition in 9 Hrs. .... A powerful earthquake at 8:32 am. on May 18, caused the north slope to plunge into the valleys below, releasing the pressure within with a lateral, northward, fan-shaped explosion. This initial eight minute blast destroyed 230 square miles of forest.

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It all happened in 9 hours. Where is the problem here? Why couldn't your picture be the product of the same kind of an event?

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Fascinatingly, your scenario cannot explain how the fossils come to be sorted in the specific layers and not jumbled together in one mixed bag (as is the case when we do find evidence of a catastrophic flooding event) or all laid out in one horizontal layer (as is the case when we do find evidence of a catastrophic burial event).

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What? Excuse me, they are all jumbled up. I don't see them all neatly in one package. How exactly did you come to the conclusion that they are arranged in some neat order?

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So in addition to a lack of evidence for a catastrophic event, you have no mechanism to cause rapid layer formation AND the sorted pattern of the fossils.

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We infer past events. We can not present observable evidence for past events. Where is your evidence that it happened in 5 million years?

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No, that is another logical fallacy:

​

Everything within the A circle = B but not everything within the B circle =A.

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Wrong. This is not what I said.I said that: IF A = B THEN B = A. Which is true. You did not present that.What you made is a set and proper subset. The difference between a subset and a proper subset is that a subset may imply that A = B and B = A, yet a proper subset implies that A ⊂ B and B ⊃ A. Thus we have that A ≠ B and B ≠ A. That is what you presented. Yet that is nto what I said. Please note the difference.The first case is what you presented. where we have A being the proper subset of B. The second case is what I presented where A is the subset of B and B is the subset of A. Thus making them both equal. Thus A = B and B = A is ture. Thus my logical fact IF A = B THEN B = A stands.In your example, it never stands tha either A = B, or that B = A. They are always unequal. You simply confused = and →.I didn't say: IF A → B THEN B → A.
I said that: IF A = B THEN B = A.There is a difference between a subset and a proper subset. Please do learn them.Subset - Wikipedia
Proper Subset -- from Wolfram MathWorld

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(ps note that it is IF ... THEN ..., not IF ... THAN ... )

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Since you ahve shown a lack of knowledge in math and logic, I would suggest to you to rather be more concerned with math and logic, and not to be so preoccupied with my spelling.

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Because it is a logical fallacy it cannot be a fact.

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It's not a logical fallacy, you don't know the difference between an equality and and implication, and the difference between a subset and a proper subset.So now that you have thoroughly discredited yourself, as far as logic is concerned, please do tell me, why do you feel you can tell me, if my statements are logical fallacies or not? I mean, If you made a logical fallacy that was not so elementary, than I wouldn't mind so much. But this was an elementary mistake. So there is absolutely no way you are qualified to be telling me that my statements are logical fallacies. So, why did you feel that you should judge me in the first place? Please try and stay consistent and not judge the logic of my arguments in the future.

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Because any logical conclusion can be false it cannot be a fact.

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But a logical statement is a fact. It is a logical fact. A pure logical statement is a fact. IF A = A THEN A ≠ ~A. This is a logical fact. It's called the law of identity and it means that if something is itself than it is itself and not something that is not itself.

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Hi Smooth Operator, I'm separating this out from the other posts.

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"This" being related to the actual old age of the earth, the previous context being

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No problem. I like everything in one post so I'm putting it back together. Feel free to split them back again.

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You will note that the top alpha decay event listed is 238U with a half life of ~4.5 billion years, (with the next two being 234U with a half life of ~245 thousand years and 230Th with a half life of ~75 thousand years).

​

Simply put, this means that a long time needs to pass before you have enough decay events to form the halos.

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You claim that U238 has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. Can you tell me who counted it for that long?

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Or you assume (by some unknown magical process that has no evidence for it) that the rate of decay was significantly different in the past.

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Well here we have evidece that rates of decay can change.

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An accelerated alpha-decay damage study of a glass-bonded sodalite ceramic waste form has been completed recently. The study was designed to investigate the physical and chemical durability of the waste form after exposure to 238Pu alpha decay. The alpha-decay dose at the end of the four year study was approximately 1.0 1018 decays/gram of material.

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http://www.astm.org/JOURNALS/JAI/PAGES/JAI12421.htm

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If you change the rate of decay, so that the halos could form in a shorter time period, then you also change the alpha particle energy.

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No, not always so. It can also be changed without changing the energy of the particle.

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Sudden change in the number of nodes. The harmonic oscillator wave function for well depths of 58 MeV (a) and 54 MeV (b). The x-axis is the radial coordinate of the alpha particle, T = ρ/(2η), where ρ and η are defined in
Green & Lee (1955). Figure 2a shows the harmonic oscillator wave function for a well depth of 58 MeV. Figure 2b shows what happens when the well depth is changed to 54 MeV, without changing the alpha particle energy.

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http://static.icr.org/...erated-Decay-Theoretical-Models.pdf

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If you change the alpha particle energy, then you change the diameter of the halo formed by the decay for that particle.

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The evidence shows no variation in the diameter of the halos, so it is logical to infer that there was no change to the decay rates during the time that the halos formed.

​

Thus it is logical to infer that "several hundred million years to form" the evidence that you see in the picture above have indeed occurred.

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Not really. Since you need about 4.5 billion years to actually make the halo, you have never observed it form int he first place. Therefore, you don't know if that particualr U238 halo that was formed by alpha decay, was formed by an accelerated or by a non-accelerated rate of decay.Edited by Smooth Operator, : No reason given.Edited by Smooth Operator, : No reason given.

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SETI doesn't proclaim the identity of extraterestrials to be out of bounds or out of the sphere of methodological naturalism. SETI is merely limited by technology and is not trying to redefine science like ID is. Big difference.

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What a non sequitur! What the hell does that have to do with anything?It's like me saying that a certain car is broken, yet you claim, no it's not because it's red!ID wanting to, or not wanting to redefine science, or adhering, or not adhering to methodological naturalism, has nothing to do with the fact that both ID and SETI, which is basicly a subset of ID, claim that you can't get for the design to the designer.

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That you hadn't tried to argue for loss of all function, instead of just the known function.

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Which is true.

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And you are wrong as usual. The point is that the assembly of proteins is controlled by genes. So producing multiple copies of the same protein just requires using the same gene over and over again. Evolution doesn't enter into it.

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What if they were different proteins of the same size N? Than they would be different, thus needing more DNA, but would have the same complexity. But since there would be more of them, the probability of them forming would be lower.

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The sequence of the protein is dictated by the gene. Thus proteins do not assemble by chance.

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According to you, one of them did. The proteins come from genes. Yet you need proteins to have a DNA replication. Since it would lead to an infinite regress to say this has been happening since forever, it's obvious that one came first. How? Well, you claim one came about by chance.

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I defined proportional a couple of posts back. Two quantities a,b are proportional if there is a constant c, such that a = c.b for all values of b. THey are inversely proportional if a = c.1/b for all values of b.

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Okay, and how would you define this equation. Proportionality (mathematics) - Wikipedia

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That is an inverse proportional relationship.

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Great. And what is this?1/2 - 1
1/4 - 2
1/8 - 3
1/16 - 4
1/32 - 5
1/64 - 6
1/128 - 7
1/256 - 8
1/512 - 9

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Either we find out what the real probabilities are or we admit that we can't do the calculation for lack of the correct figures.

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Which is a statement that you yourself do not agree with. You basicly want to stop science in its tracks. When science doesn't know something, it infers it. I don't know if you actually read what I wrote few posts ago, but I'll re post it now. Here it is...Looking at the Sun, we see it goes around the Earth every 24 hours. We know it did so every single day for past few thousand years at least. We know that because we saw it. It's a fact. And from this fact, we produced a description of natural laws that claim that Sun is going to continue doing so in the future. You see now, this is called an inference. This is a part of the scientific reasoning. We infer things from past events. We do not know for sure the Sun will rise up. Maybe, tomorrow it will stop in the middle of the day, and start jumping up and down for 5 minutes, and then keep going as nothign had happened. And will do so for another few thousand years.So you see, in this case, we would rewrite our laws and we would then write a law of motion of the Sun that claims that Sun goes around the Earth for few thousands of years, and then starts jumping up and down for 5 minutes and then continues for another few thousand years to orbit the Earth.Yes, we could be wrong. Sun could do exactly that tommorow. But tell me, is it reasonable to thik that it's going to? Is it reasonable that tommorow is going to do something else? No it's not. That is why we say that in absence of prior knowledge we use unifom probability. And in this case, we infer, we do not know for sure, but we infer that the Sun is going to do the same thing tommorow, as it has been doing for at least few thousands of years. But a much higher probability is that tommorow is not going to be different then the last few thousands of years. So the beast reasonable thing to infer is that it's not going to be any different. Why do we do this? Because it's the best method we have. And it works. So untill we have a better method, we arte sticking with this one. It's not perfect. It's not supposed to be. It's good, it works and that's all we want.If you agree with this, than you also agree that assuming uniform probability in other instances is justified. If not, you have a contradiction.

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In reality it's more to do with not knowing all the variables to an adequate precision - but also knowing that the die is a regular shape and that the mass should be evenly distributed. Even your quote points to the knowledge that the die is symmetrical,

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You are missing the point. It's not about what we DO know, it's about what we DON'T know. And we DON'T know all the laws that govern the dice. We simply don't. And based on that LACK of knowledge, basicly our ignorance, we assume uniform probability. And it works.

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Then you are criticising a strawman. The methodological naturalism of science only ignores the supernatural. Intelligence, whether animal, human or hypothetical extraterrestrial species is included within the natural.

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It's not a strawman, because materialism is also implied today.

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In fact I know that the multiverse is entirely within nature and that scientific proposals for the cause of the Big Bang are likewise natural.

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No, by definition can not be. Our universe is the nature. Everything that is outside of it is supernatural. So by definition the multiverse and big bang are supernatural.In the case of the multiverse, you have a collection of universes. Our universe, our nature is just one universe of an infinity of other universes. Which means there is something else besides our nature. Thus this idea is supernatural.The same goes for the big bang. Either it caused itself, or it was caused by something else. It could not have caused itself because it would first have to exist to be able to cuse anything. So the only other option is that it was caused by something else. And this somethign else was outside of nature. Thus this idea itself is also supernatural.

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So the fact that you didn't calculate the Kolmogorov complexity means that they are NOT sequences ? What a strange idea.

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No, I simply said that KC is not used for the probability of events. Shannon information is used instead.CSI is basicly a mix of KC, SI and a generalized notion of Fisher's hypothesis testing.

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Nevertheless the relevant probability is not dictated by the length of the sequence.

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But it is by the amount of proteins.

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These ERV's have the same features as retroviruses (e.g. LTR's, gag, pol, env), they can become infectious, their insertional biases match modern retroviruses, etc. It quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and flies like a duck but you want to tell us that it was magically poofed into the genome and isn't due to a retroviral insertion.

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No, I'm saying that they are there for a purpose. They are one of the causes of genetic variability we see today.

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What I do know is that if I am ever brought up on murder charges I want you in my jury. All my attorney needs to do is claim that fingerprints are not evidence. They are merely swirls of oil that were designed to capture dust floating through the air. Any DNA match of hair left at the crime scene is not evidence of me being at the crime scene. Oh no. It is just evidence that the DNA in my body and the DNA at the crime scene had a common creator.

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How is this relevant to what we are discussing now?

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So the goal of ID is not to explain anything in biology? That's news.

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The goal of ID is to detect design.

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Can you answer the question or not? Why is there more LTR divergence in an ERV shared by all apes than in the LTR's of an ERV shared by just humans and chimps? Evolution can easily explain this, but it appears that ID once again is incapable of dealing with evidence in the world of biology.

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Your questions are a non sequitur. It's like me asking you, why do all monitors have a transparent screen? What is the point of that question?

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Why is it a better explanation, other than just asserting it? Why is it that every time we observe retroviruses inserting into a genome they insert randomly among billions of bases in the genome, even in genomes that are 100% identical? Why is it that up to 25% of cancers can be directly linked to a retroviral insertion into an oncogene in a somatic cell? Is that part of the design, giving people cancer?

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You don't know it's a random insertation. You simply assume it. For an example, if the sheep didn't have a particular ERV insertation, they would not be alive today. Because it is used in the development of the placenta.

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We report here in vivo and in vitro experiments finding that the envelope of a particular class of ERVs of sheep, endogenous Jaagsiekte sheep retroviruses (enJSRVs), regulates trophectoderm growth and differentiation in the periimplantation conceptus (embryo/fetus and associated extraembryonic membranes). The enJSRV envelope gene is expressed in the trophectoderm of the elongating ovine conceptus after day 12 of pregnancy. Loss-of-function experiments were conducted in utero by injecting morpholino antisense oligonucleotides on day 8 of pregnancy that blocked enJSRV envelope protein production in the conceptus trophectoderm. This approach retarded trophectoderm outgrowth during conceptus elongation and inhibited trophoblast giant binucleate cell differentiation as observed on day 16. Pregnancy loss was observed by day 20 in sheep receiving morpholino antisense oligonucleotides.

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Endogenous retroviruses regulate periimplantation placental growth and differentiation - PubMedAnd you have to be able to tell apart design and effects of natural forces on the original design. just because we have problems with viruses today that doesn't mean that they were made that way in the first place. They probably were made for maintenence of living organisms, but some have degenerated since than and are causing trouble. Besides, even if they were designed to be malicious, that still means they were designed.

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Just ask anyone who has siblings if common descent is possible.

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That doesn't imply that polar bears and horses are related.

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Because you would need to start over. That is a drastic reduction in fitness. You would need to reevolve EVERYTHING. You would need to reevolve tRNA's, ribosomes, polymerases, DNA binding proteins, on and on and on.

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So what? There is nothing stopping evolution from doing it. What is the physical restraint that is making evolution not be able to evolve a different geentic code? If tehre is none, then it's possible for evolution to do so. So evolution also predicts that.

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On the flip side, there is nothing stopping a designer from starting from scratch. In fact, for an omnipotent and omniscient designer starting over takes just as much time and effort as copying previous designs.

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That's true. And even for a non-omnipotent one. And it just so happens that there are instances of a non-standard genetic code. So tell me, was this wan designed, or did it evolve?Non-standard Genetic Codes

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Completely false. Homology DOES NOT IMPLY A NESTED HIERARCHY. Automobiles share homology, but they do not fall into a nested hierarchy as we would expect from a design process. A nested hierarchy is a PATTERN OF HOMOLOGY, not homology itself.

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Big deal. You still have a contradiction. It's just a one word of difference. Which still doesn't make any difference. Because a pattern of similarity is still similarity. So if in one case similsrity implies something, and in another it does not, it's a contradiction. You still have a contradiction. Thus it's unfalsifiable. Besides, cars do have a pattern of homology. Just like frying pans evolving from metal cups do, as I have shown few posts ago. You can order things in such a way to imply a pattern of similarity.

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Secondly, if evolution is true and if life shares common ancestry then we should observe a nested hierarchy among lineages that did not participate in horizontal gene transfer. This is the TEST.

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Why? Explain how does this come from the idea of evolution.

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So we should not find any fossils with feather impressions and three middle ear bones.

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Why not? If some animals evolved those traits, why not the others? What's stopping them?

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We should not find living bats with feathers.

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Why not? If birds evolved feathers, why not bats?

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We should not find an ostrich with mammary glands. An ostrich with mammary glands would share homologous structures with mammals, but this would break the nested hierarchy and would falsify common descent. Do you understand this or not?

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No it wouldn't. You could simply claim it evolved independently. Just like eyes supposedly evolved independently. Furthermore, CD is still unfalsifiable. Because when you do find something at odds with a standard tree, you simply re-classify the animal. And than it again has all the "right" features.

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No, the measurement tool is crude.

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Not gonna fly. I don't care if it's too crude. That doesn't change the FACT that measurements show that there is no such a thing a a single nested hierarchy. Now we can discuss the reasons for why is that so, but you can't say that there is such a thing, and that we simply can't construct it.Basicly your argument fails because I could just as well say that the reason why we have some nested hierarchies i precisely because the tools are too crude. Why is my explanation worse than yours? It's not, it's actually better. All the previious supporting evidence actually wa done of older tools. And with newer and newer tools, we find more and more evidence that does not support one tree of life. That's what we see. You can't deny that. The only thing you can do is discuss why is this so.

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This is also what the author said:

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"Just as it would be futile to use radioisotopes with modest half lives to date ancient rocks, it appears unrealistic to expect conventional linear, homoplasy-sensitive sequences to reliably resolve series of events that transpired in a small fraction of deep time."

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Well good for him. That's what he believes the reason to be. I could also say that the reason why we have nested hierarchies at all is because tolls are not precise enough, and in teh future, we are going to have even less of them.Besides, the author said that measurements done on teh state of the art equipment also show discrepencies. So however you look at it, this is not what you want.

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The evidence presented here suggests that large amounts of conventional characters will not always suffice, even if analyzed by state-of-the-art methodology.

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Yes, as you can see, even if we analyze them with the best equipment we have, we still get discrepencies. So if you argue that tiscrepencies are due to bad equipment, I could just as well argue that nested hierarchies are due to bad equipment.In the end, the present evidence tells us that there is no one single nested hierarchy.

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I thought we were talking about evolution which occurs at the level of the population, not at the level of the individual.

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And we are. But to know what is happening, we have to look at the individual. And we have to look at what exactly is it that's happening inside it.

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So you are saying that if evolution is true that the next generation of humans could look like winged dogs and nothing like apes? Am I getting this correctly?

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Exactly. Some macro-mutation could happen, and change the species in one generation. If you disagree, does than mean there are limits to evolution?

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Let's look at the Glofish. This is a fish that carries and exact copy of the jellyfish GFP (green fluorescent protein) gene. This allows the fish to glow under UV light. This exact copy of the jellyfish GFP gene is not found in any other vertebrate fish. It is a clear violation of the nested hierarchy. Guess how it got there? Human designers. Humans have no problem moving genes between species and in clear violation of the nested hierarchy. Humans have no problem with getting mice to express human proteins in vivo. "Humanized" mice have been a huge advance in biomedical research. GM foods have been a big step forward in increasing yields and quality of product.

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Yet all the discrepencies we find in nature you simply call noise and homoplasy. Why not call it design?

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So why do we see a nested hierarchy if design is true?

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But we don't see it. We see it only if we cherry pick the results. Bsides. I already showed you an example of designed nested hierarchy in Russian dolls. Design can produce nested hierarchy.

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Why don't we see ostriches with mammary glands? Why don't we see bats with feathers?

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Why should we? This is a non sequitur. This question doesn't imply anything. Yous imply found a bunch of animals and found that only those animals have certain features. That is all, that doesn't imply anything.And if some day they were to be found to have soem other feature, or some other animal was found to have one of the features that was thought to be present only in a certain group, that trait would not be called monophyletic anymore. And that's that. There would be a reclassification and nothing would be falsified. Than you could just pick another trait that you find in a certain group and claim it only happens in this group. Untill it's also found in another one.

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You are begging the question.

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Does saying that a computer was designed to work as it does beg the question?

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Fish have a two chambered heart and gills. Mammals have fur and a four chambered heart.

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Does that mean that they don't share a common ancestor? If having eyes does imply a common ancestor, does not sharing the gills imply a non-common ancestry?

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So where is the fish with fur or the mammal with gills? Why don't we see these things if design is true?

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Why should we?

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So let's summarize. ID can't explain ERV orthology, biogeography, the pattern of homology, the fossil record, and really anything else in biology. So why do you feel it necessary to come into a thread and discuss ID and biology since ID doesn't address anything in biology?

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Because ID is about detecting design. If you can't accept that, than that's your problem.Edited by Smooth Operator, : No reason given.

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Did you know YOU can download and run SETI and help in the detection of extraterrestrial life? Does ID have anything where a layperson can detect design and know it is, in fact, designed?

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You can start by visiting this web site.Forbidden

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I'm beginning to wonder what bizarre defect in my psychological makeup is causing me to continue a dialog with you. You exhibit a cycle that gives no indication of diminishing, yet here I am, apparently poised to reply yet again while expecting something different to happen this time.

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The cycle is simple. Someone says something, and you either misinterpret it or throw in an unrelated red herring.

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So they reply and clarify, and you do it again.

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So they reply and clarify yet again, and you do it again.

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Let's take this little example here:

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As we shall see shortly, you are the one who is confused not me.

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Clearly you didn't understand the question. I could clarify yet again, but until you help me understand how your response makes any sense in the context of the question there isn't any point to responding to this or anything in your message since it is full of equally puzzling malapropisms, but on the scale of concepts rather than words. It's like you're using something that feels like logical thinking to you but only to you.

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One of the questions youa sked was: "Can you name any legitimate field of science that makes an analogous claim in the absence of supporting evidence? You can't, right?"And my answer was SETI.So where's the problem?

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Can you name any other field of science that holds an equivalent position as a basic tenet?

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Once more. SETI.

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The position of intelligent design is that it is not possible to know anything about the nature of the designer. SETI has no such equivalent position where in the absence of any evidence they claim there's something it isn't possible to know. Why don't I give you the setup question again and you can give it another try.

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SETI has the same position. Based on just the signal they would detect from space, they can not know anything about the designer. Now, if they actually saw him, than they would know a lot about him, but then they wouldn't be needing any method for design detection in the first place.

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Unlike any other field of science, without any evidence ID states a priori what it isn't possible to know, specifically, anything about the designer. Here's a quote from Of Pandas and People:

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Because that's logic. Pure logic. If we detect CSI (regardless of what you think of it) we can not know what was the source. Was it supernatural, extra-terestrial, or human. Or maby a very intelligent animal. There is no information leading to that conclusion.Therefore, either we actually see the designer, or we use philosophy or religion to tell us. There is no other way.

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Can you name any other field of science that holds an equivalent position as a basic tenet?

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Any field of science that is based on design detection.