Defence of Intelligent Design

This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You seriously believe that there's no new species? There's as many transitional fossils as there are fossils, because every organism is "transitional." You're the transitional organism between your parents and your children.

Well, I know it's not me you're talking to, but if you cared to come to Prior Lake, MN, I'll tell you right to your face that there's no scientific basis to intelligent design, that it can't construct hypotheses or make predictions, and that anybody who believes it does so to satisfy a deeply-held religious ideology that they couldn't abide being wrong.If you want to fight after that, we can do that, too. I'm trained in the use of several weapons so I'm happy to let you choose.On the other hand, you could just look around this board, get involved in some of the threads, and actually find out why rational people come to the conclusion that there's no science in ID.

How could anybody be created in the image of something that doesn't exist?

I disagree. I think that my comment points out that you can hardly claim that it's self-evident that we're created in the image of god by god unless it's also self-evident that god exists in the first place, which it is not.I think a lot of times these debates stagnate because people are all too willing to accept that a belief in god is reasonable. I'm not. If you're going to talk about God, I need to hear why you believe he exists, first. It has to start with that.Oh, well. Nobody has to respond if they don't want to. But if you're going to talk about god with me, we have to start with whether or not he exists. I'm not willing to just assume he does.

If I can show that there's no designer capable of the design that doesn't bring contradictions or infinite regression into the theory, then I've disproved the design conjecture.

What are you talking about? Mutation is when you get genes that didn't come from either of your parents.And you get genes from both of your parents. That is, you have two alleles of every gene. They don't have to be the same.

How so? I tried looking back in the thread but it's difficult to determine if you're talking about a specific gene that acts this way, or if you think all genes act this way. I don't understand.Either way, I think you're incorrect. It's possible to pass on an allele you only have one of. Only about half of your offspring will get it. Only if the parents only have one child. In most species, this is hardly the case. If they had four children, so that there were two copies of the gene, would that be an increase?If not, you're still inconsistent - a reduction in the number of copies of an allele isn't a loss of information if an increase in the number of copies of an allele isn't a gain of information. You can't have it both ways, as you are trying to do.Relevant to biology, the amount of "information" in a gene pool is best described as the number of different alleles for a given gene. Mutation can give rise to new alleles. Therefore mutation can give rise to new "information." What are you talking about? For any given gene in your DNA, you have two alleles - one you got from your mom and one from your dad. But a mutation can alter those alleles before they combine. You still get two alleles per gene. It's just that one of them is not an allele either of your parents had.It's pretty clear you need to learn some genetics.

It doesn't work like that. You always have an allele for the gene. If you deleted it and moved forward all the subsequent base sequences, then the cellular mechanisms would interpret those next sequences as the allele for that gene. Those sequences are probably junk pseudogenes, so who knows what would happen. Yes. Mutations lead to new alleles in the gene pool. Evolution is a change of allele frequencies in the gene pool. Mutation is apart of evolution. Right, exactly. Individuals don't evolve. You're born with all the mutations you'll ever have (that will ever matter, that is.) Evolution happens to populations, not individuals. That's why people study population genetics.

I see you're just making up terms wholesale, now.Seriously, why not just sit down with some science books and find out how all this works? We're talking about one of the best-supported theories in science. You've stopped pointing out any kind of flaw with the theory itself and now you're just making things up to explain how evolution could not be true, yet have things look the way they do.

Then stop talking about it. What you need to be doing is reading on the subject, not talking about it. Says you. I say that new alleles = new information. You can very well play whatever game you want - defining "information" any way you choose - but I don't have to play along. New alleles means new information by any definition of "information" with relevance to biology. Because we call it that. Of what possible relevance could human nomenclature be? Somehow, I doubt it. After all, natural selection selects for what works. That includes beneficial mutations. Natural selection selects for change, because stagnation - stasis of the gene pool - is maladaptive.I hope you're done talking about this. You need to aquaint yourself with the actual theory of evolution and basic genetics. I don't understand why learning more about the subject - from genuine scientific sources - seems anathema to you.

I guess we will. In the meantime you can go ahead making up whatever you like. I begin to see how you chose your username: your pattern seems to be that you say whatever pops into your head with no regard to it's accuracy or support by evidence. Surely you can't believe that a violent flood deposited sediment strata with things like gentle wave marks or the cracked surface you see on a salt flat? How could a flood deposit a strata that can only be formed by water evaporation under a strata that can only be formed at the bottom of a sea? You can't seriously be so ignorant of every single subject you've chosen to post on, can you? You must just be ribbing us.

In a word, scaffolding.Consider the stone arch. It's irreducably complex, right? In that, if you take away any stone, the whole thing collapses, right?Yet, somehow arches are built, piece by piece. How is this done? A scaffold is erected to support the structure until it is completed, then the scaffold is taken away.This is an analogy, of course. But note that the scaffold does the same thing an arch does - hold stuff up - it's just that arches do a better job. So the arch is an "evolutionary" improvement on the scaffold.So, evolution explains "irreducably complex" systems and structures by the observation that such structures aren't really irreducably complex if you build them up the right way - by using "scaffolds", structures that have been co-opted to do the same thing while a better system evolves.

Yeah, but intelligence isn't magic. Intelligence can't cause anything to happen that isn't already possible by natural means.

Nature's systems are self-assembing. They need no "puzzler" to put them together.When was the last time you observed any intelligent design resulting in something as complex as life? Only natural selection + random mutation has the creative potential to create life.

So, you'd accept evidence of change at levels higher than species as evidence of macro-evolution?

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Coloniality in Chlorella vulgaris Boraas (1983) reported the induction of multicellularity in a strain of Chlorella pyrenoidosa (since reclassified as C. vulgaris) by predation. He was growing the unicellular green alga in the first stage of a two stage continuous culture system as for food for a flagellate predator, Ochromonas sp., that was growing in the second stage. Due to the failure of a pump, flagellates washed back into the first stage. Within five days a colonial form of the Chlorella appeared. It rapidly came to dominate the culture. The colony size ranged from 4 cells to 32 cells. Eventually it stabilized at 8 cells. This colonial form has persisted in culture for about a decade. The new form has been keyed out using a number of algal taxonomic keys. They key out now as being in the genus Coelosphaerium, which is in a different family from Chlorella.

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Anyway, what does it matter? Taxa higher than species are essentially arbitrary, anyway. And we can show you ample evidence of new species. There's no such thing as "kinds", if you were going to trot out that old horse. That's just biological Platonism at it's worst.