What exactly is ID?

I am sorry Percy if you think I am too simplified in my replies. I like to keep it on a level that anyone can comprehend because I know that when I reply it is to more than just to you. And you don't have to have a Ph D. to get this stuff. So it seems that the question has boiled down to "What are the odds of a positive mutation even being possible?" Before we can answer this question, we must agree on what point is it safe to actually call something "impossible?" Most people normal mean that the chances of that "something" happening are so small that they are very improbable. And I do admit that just what constitutes impossible depends on who is doing the judging. Someone mentioned winning the lottery earlier, I’ll bet that if a person won the state lottery two weeks straight in a row, which is about a chance of one in a hundred trillion, the judges would think that that was pretty impossible. I’m sure they wouldn’t pay on the second win and they would probably investigate the first one with a fine tooth comb. Or if a person were to toss 150 quarters in the air, they should expect that only once in 10 to the 45th power tosses, that the coins would all come up heads. To put this into perspective of just how big that number is, lets imagine how long it would take to toss 150 coins that many times. Since flipping coins, counting all the heads, and then picking them all back up, can be very slow and time consuming, lets imagine we employed 1,000 super fast people to all help us toss coins. If each person could do the entire process once per second, and we allowed them to do this for one hundred years they still could only flip the coins about three trillion times, which is a long way away from 10 to the 45th power. So suppose you searched for a much faster way to flip coins and so what you did was you programmed a computer to simulate the tossing of 150 coins and it could do it in a "trillionth" of a second, and then you enlisted a billion of these simulators and all together you call them one "pod." Then from there you proceeded to use ten billion of these "pods" and you let them all run at that speed for 3000 years. Even in all of that time you would still only have flipped the quarters 10 to the 42 power times. My point in all of this should be obvious, that since no sane person would ever expect to get all 150 coins to land on heads. I believe anyone in there right mind would consider doing so to be basically "impossible." Therefore, I hope that we are safe to agree that the odds of 10 to the 45 th to one are basically impossible.So lets for now completely ignore the impossible odds of life forming from non-life. Lets forgo the concept where a single cell must develop all at once and fully capable of reproducing. And we will also ignore the fact that this had to occur from completely random processes from out of nonliving matter (meaning that natural selective processes don’t apply). We for now will just look at the possibility for the development of information to take place in the "already existing" DNA of a genome. What are the odds? Evolution has to explain how all the information in the DNA of plants and animals got into the genome to begin with. Evolution theory says that all life of today was built up through a gradual build up of steps of this information. Each step adding a small amount of information to the genome and in each step, selection has to test if the mutation is positive or not, and destroy the negative ones. You might look at mutations in the nucleotides of DNA like a writer making random changes in the letters of a book. Imagine if the writer of a novel were trying to improve his novel by changing letters at random. The writer would change a few random letters and then (keeping with reproduction processes) he reprints his book at least twice, once with the changes and once with the original. He would then check to see if he liked the changes and throw it away if he didn’t. He could not just keep the changes he liked; he would have to keep the entire text with all the random changes or throw it all away and stay with the original. It would be all or nothing. The random changes in the letters of the book corresponds with the random mutations said to occur in the DNA message of an organism, and the reprinting of the two copies corresponds with organisms ability to reproduce. The choice to keep one over the other corresponds with natural selection. Right about here, evolution proponents usually try to argue that the writer should be able to just hold on to those changes he likes and carry them on while disposing of the ones he doesn't like. However catch what they just did. They just unwittingly smuggled "intelligence" into the mix. For nature to "hold on to the changes it likes" and dispose of the ones it does not, implies that nature has a plan. But now evolutionists are adamant that the whole mutation process is completely random with no plan behind it. If nature has a plan then nature must have intelligence, and now we are talking about "intelligent design." No, the writer must keep all changes made to his novel at random (good and bad) or he must toss the whole thing out and stick with the original. This would dictate that he keep his changes to a bare minimum. Any random changes much more than one letter would have a much higher chance of rendering a negative change which would require destroying it and restarting. But then, even with the improvements there would be likely a problem that would cause him to reject it anyway. For example randomly changing a letter in one word might actually change that word into a new and improved word but perhaps now that word doesn’t make sense in the sentence or in the paragraph. Or it may not make sense in the reading of the book. If the book was about three mice, and the first letter of mice was changed to d to make dice, most of the other sentences with the word mice would need changing. And even if you could somehow change all the mice words to dice, you still would probably render the entire book to be unintelligible. This objection of course has been raised in the past and its a very valid one. To get an improvement you have to have several correlated changes all taking place at the same time and in just the right places. In other words you have to have much more than 150 coins all land on their heads at once in each and every step of the process of evolution. I haven’t calculated it, but obviously if you do, the odds of these correlated changes occurring all at once far surpasses our "impossible" number.

Systems containing csi have only been observed being produced by intelligent sources (i.e. human).

So if an ID proponent uses "present is the key to the past" ideology, it is considered a fallacy, but when an evolutionist does it its considered good science?

Those figures are just given to give us an idea of the impossible odds the formation of first life must overcome.

The fact of the matter is that present simple single celled organisms, such as heterotrophs, are considered by many evolutionary scientists to be the likely first life forms.

Yes this would be a huge problem if we had no way to peer into the box and examine its contents to see if the other tiles also had the number 42 on them.

The oldest claimed fossils are stromatolites 3.5 billion years old, formed by blue green algae very similar to what we observe today.

No problem my friend. First I want to point out that your example starts and ends with in the "primate" family. Next I want you to know that I have seen this very picture many times. Thank you for being the first to point out that "A" is a modern chimp. Every one before you, that I have encountered, have tried to obscure that little bit of information which sent up the red flags right off the bat. Also I noticed that your link did . . . [clipped for brevity]

If the above mentioned cases don't completely destroy the parade of skulls touted as human evolution, in your mind, they should at least give cause for extreme doubt. They make for a really neat slide show, but they do not present evidence of evolution of man. If the paleontologists themselves can not be sure what they are looking at, how can we laymen? Therefore they do nothing in the way of helping in our current discussion about added genetic information. That's because as British paleontologist and senior editor of the scientific journal Nature, Henry Gee said, "To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story- amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."

Now if you care to direct this conversation to the nearest "Age of the Earth" discussion, I'll be happy to continue it.

The beetle example I gave explains just fine how an organism can go from flier, to nonflying, back to flier, merely by manipulating the code that already exists within the gene pool.

Also the walking stick fossil record (like all of the fossil record) is only evidence of a certain species existence.

Message 809: See Figure 1 from Nature 421, 264 - 267 (16 January 2003); doi:10.1038/nature01313 (reproduced below)Walkingstick insects originally started out as winged insects (blue at start and top row). That diversified.And some lost wings (red). And diversified.And some regained wings (blue again). And diversified.And one lost wings again (Lapaphus parakensis, below, red again).

Can you explain how this occurs when information is only lost?Wings
No wings
Wings
No wingsAll by loss of information?

All presumed relationships and ages are merely just that...presumptions.

You are referring to your graph as if it is iron clad. Yet you have no basis for such an assumption. Unless the entomologists conclusions of species relational branching were actually observed and documented, they have no evidence that they are in fact related or in which order they are related.

In Message 825 I asked you whether 123456789 and 1213456789 have the same information, and you blanked. The problem for you is threefold:

1. that the additional number is indeed an increase in information, in the normal information theory meaning, thus any point insertion is indeed an increase of information,
2. that a second mutation can remove the addition, thereby reverting to the original condition, and one or the other of these mutations necessarily violates your "no increase in information" position,
3. finally, when we talk about DNA rather than just numbers, we can have a section of DNA that codes for a protein being interrupted by this insertion, changing the protein output.

Message 809 We can calculate the effect of such information on evolution as follows:

1. Wings
2. No wings = (a) + information_a = Wings + information_a
   IF going from (a) to (b) involves a loss of information then information_a is positive
   
3. Wings = (b) + information_b = No wings + information_b = (a) + information_a + information_b = Wings + information_a + information_b
   IF going from (b) to (c) involves a loss of information then information_b is positive

Wings - Wings = information_a + information_b = 0
information_a + information_b = 0
information_a = 0 - information_bEither information is gained in one case, or the information content that affects evolution ≡ 0Obviously if information is always lost, that then this concept of information has no effect on what can and cannot evolve.

Brad H writes:Only if you are going to count single celled A sexual bacteria which bear little to nothing in common with the rest of the living world around us...

Well...I know I will get called on the carpet by the administrator if I respond to that off topic comment too much. So let me just say that you have stated a presumption (as fact) that I can easily throw a big wrench into. Now if you care to direct this conversation to the nearest "Age of the Earth" discussion, I'll be happy to continue it.

I am sorry Percy if you think I am too simplified in my replies

To get an improvement you have to have several correlated changes all taking place at the same time and in just the right places. In other words you have to have much more than 150 coins all land on their heads at once in each and every step of the process of evolution.

How does ID explain the fossil record of change over time?

We can use an example. All priests are catholic. Mary is a catholic, therefore she is a priest. This is the same mistake you are committing.

Brad: So if an ID proponent uses "present is the key to the past" ideology, it is considered a fallacy, but when an evolutionist does it its considered good science?Taq: When has an ID proponent observed this supposed designer producing new life in the present?

Some are hypothesizing that the first life didn't have proteins at all.

Brad: The oldest claimed fossils are stromatolites 3.5 billion years old, formed by blue green algae very similar to what we observe today.Taq: We have no idea how similar those organisms were to modern life. None at all, other than they were single celled organisms that produced specific geologic structures. That's it. Again, you are jumping to conclusions based on very shaky assumptions.

You were asked about ID, not evolution. So why did you write such a large post about evolution? What is the ID explanation for this series, and what experiments can we run to test this explanation?

When I posted those pictures to you I asked for "A practical application of ID" not a flawed critique of evolution.

Half of my graduate work was in the fields of fossil man and human osteology. I have handled and studied casts of most of those.

See Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 for starters. Note that the issue is not just the various methods for counting the miimum ages by various means, but the correlations between them.

First, this does not use any fossil evidence, as the evidence is genetic, and second, the diagram includes 39 living species in the order Phasmatodea, and this includes several genera and family groups within the order.

This is not comparable to your beetle species, which only lost wings.

You have not explained this yet in any way that can account for what is shown in the diagram.

And once again I direct you to see Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1, as I have several times already (including one most recently in Message 1010 in answer to your request. It is rather dishonest in my opinion to keep making comments like this and not dealing with the age issue first.

In Message 825 I asked you whether 123456789 and 1213456789 have the same information, and you blanked.

First, it's "asexual", not "A sexual". Second, there are far more bacterial cells in the human body than human cells, especially in the human gut, and without them you couldn't digest your food, so they have a great deal to do with us. Third, bacterial cells use the same DNA structure, nucleotides and amino acids as all other cell types on the planet.

I know you're just making things up as you go along. If that's not true then why don't you surprise us and finally support something you say with actual evidence.

Percy: Life has existed on Earth for at least 3 billion years. That would require adding only a single base/pair per year. Doesn't sound so impossible now, does it?Brad: ...let me just say that you have stated a presumption (as fact) that I can easily throw a big wrench into.Percy: This thread is about defining ID. Does ID believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old? If so, then of course it's on topic. It sounds to me like you're confusing ID and young Earth creationism, but if you want to claim that ID believes the Earth is young then go ahead. Why break your streak of wrong statements now? By the way, Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, a founding member of the ID movement, and one of ID's most prominent proponents, believes the Earth is billions of years old.

If the succession of skulls are NOT evidence for evolutionary development of humans, then no explanation for the genetic changes are required on the part of ID.

I'll be the first to admit that much of my arguments utilize common knowledge science and logic, but your insinuation that I don't back anything I say is easily proven false. For example two of my recent messages provided backing sources. Or did you miss those? see 1002, 1005

Of course ID has nothing to do with the age of the Earth.