Help me understand Intelligent Design (part 2)

Out of curiousity, I did a quick keyword search, and only two hits came up on the Discovery Institute website. They were press-release-type articles that didn't go into much detail about the fossil record.Interestingly, this is the closest thing I could find to a list of problems the institute has with evolution: Those are the four things they came up with? First, the Miller-Urey experiment deals with abiogenesis theory, not evolution. Haeckel and the gill slits are essentially the same issue, an issue of scientific dishonesty that has been known for 100+ years (though apparently some textbook editors were late on figuring that one out...). Peppered moths? Is that really still an issue?Seems to me, the Discovery Institute cannot come up with a single decent criticism/threat to theory of evolution, so they trot out these silly examples from decades/centuries past. Thinking about it, claims regarding fossil record gaps seem pretty good compared to what they came up with...In any case, regarding the "substance" of Golfer's original point: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Yep. You found a paper published by an IDer that mentions fossil record "gaps". Didn't show up in my Discovery Institute site search.That doesn't change the fact that the Discovery Institute itself doesn't seem to espouse fossil record gaps as pro-ID. I do the same thing. I haven't seen or heard the invisible silent monkeys in my house today, so that must mean that they are still silent and still invisible. Tricky monkeys. WOW. You just went from not being sure if the fossil record was even cited by the ID camp to being expert enough in the arguments to make the statement "the fossil record in toto fits ID"

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Since you are so well versed in the topic at hand, please explain to me exactly how Intelligent Design theory predicts and is confirmed by our current knowledge of the fossil record. Then explain to me why such an explanation is a more parsimonius one then that of the Theory of Evolution.Thanks in advance for enlightening me... apparently me no think so good:

Not particularly. If you aren't interested in even briefly explaining how ID theory predicts/is confirmed by the fossil record, then you shouldn't be making such a strong assertion in a science forum."Go search for when I mentioned it before" isn't properly supporting your claims.

Read the forum rules lately? Since you've violated all of these above (messages #84, #85, and #87), I suggest you either elaborate and support your strong assertion, or retract it.I'm not sure why you are hiding behind a condescending attitude, claims that you've posted it before, and some bizarre need for a great debate.You've already expended more energy explaining why you won't explain it than if you had just explained it in the first place.

This was the assertion I asked you to support. You give me: Golfer's comments are no different than yours that I asked you to explain. They're both just assertions that the fossil record supports ID but not the Theory of Evolution.I'll take this idiocy to mean that you cannot explain how the fossil record data is predicted by ID theory, or how the data confirms ID theory.Simply ridiculous.

I asked for you to support this assertion: Specifically, I asked you to... You give me: Randomly spouting attributes of the fossil record does not describe how it is predicted by ID theory or confirms ID theory.Since you claim to have written "pages and pages" on this topic, I'm sure you can do better than the above.I'll ask you slightly more specific questions, since you seem incapable of simply supporting your assertion otherwise:1. How does ID theory predict that there will be gaps in the fossil record?

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2. How do gaps in the fossil record confirm ID theory?

Hi jaywill, The smallest computer virus is four bytes long, or 32 binary digits: Crash Pentium.A random binary sequence 32 digits long has a 1:2^32 ; or 1:4,294,967,296 chance of matching Crash Pentium.Now let's (hypothetically) randomly scramble the binary code on a 100Gb harddrive, which is relatively small by today's standards, and contains 800,000,000,000 binary digits, thus giving 799,999,999,968 possible continuous 32 binary digit strings.Dividing the number of possible string by the chance of getting Crash Pentium give us, roughly:186

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If you randomly scramble a 100Gb harddrive, you will likely get well over 100 copies of just this one specific virus; not to mention countless other potentially "active" sequences.(Someone please check my math and logic and knowledge of bytes and binary on this one.)But the take-home message is the important part: things that seem "too" biological complex to us had the benefit of evolving over millions of years and countless chemical/biochemical reactions before arriving at the state we regard today.I don't think we're capable of fully comprehending the amount of trial and error that arrived at the biological complexity, but if we break it down into simple steps/units, and check the odds versus the number of available trials, it suddenly seems very plausible.

You are correct in pointing out the hole in the analogy - randomly generated computer programs are not self-replicators under selective forces. My point was more that it is quite easy to get an "active" program from random input, given a fairly moderate trial size - something you doubted would ever occur.In your question above, though, you unnecessarily add "intelligence". To paraphrase: I'd answer yes. The selection does not have to be "intelligent", it just has to act as a filter to keep "beneficial"/"active" code and continue to scramble useless code. Eventually a very sophisticated program could come into being (gaping holes in the analogy aside).That is how biological complexity is believed to have arisen - units of very simple biological activity are quite small and can arise via random generation, but a constant process of addition/deletion/change (mutation) combined with a filter to keep the more efficient activity and throw away the the less efficient (natural selection), gradually ratcheted up the complexity over billions upon billions of trials.Biological complexity did not come into being randomly, since evolution is a non-random process.

I think you are still hung up on the filter having to have intelligence.In the case of biology, the filter is natural selection - it isn't a physical thing that decides good and bad.That is, the "filter" is simply whether or not an organism reproduces. Nope. Whenever you have an imperfectly replicating molecule evolution will take place. It is the nature of such a system - no setting up of an intelligent filter is required, when the filter is inherent to the system (selection for improved replicators). In a way, the system itself is the filter. Only for those without imagination, or who don't understand the beautiful simplicity of evolving systems.Are you suggesting that when natural selection via predation favors brown mice over black mice on brown terrain, that there is supernatural intervention guiding the owls to the black mice? Evolution is the product of random and non-random processes, so no, there is absolutely no contradiction, and no need for correction.Perhaps you should read up a bit on what the theory of evolution is really about before you start defending ID ideas - you don't seem to have a true understanding of what evolution entails.

OR: It suggest common ancestry, which there is tons of evidence to support...A simple example: I have freckles, and my siblings have freckles. What is the most parsimonius explanation for this situation? Is it that a supernatural intelligence separately imbued each of us with freckles? Or that we inherited genes for freckling from our parents?

Evolution has no "goal," nor more than gravity has a "goal". It is simply a natural process. Natural selection is not a "thing." It is an attribute of a system of imperfectly replicating molecules. You misunderstand. There are no perfect molecules, and there is no filter of imperfect vs. perfect molecules. The system of evolution is one of imperfectly-replicating molecules - the replication is imperfect, allowing for change.Do you understand now? The natural process had no "objective" or "priority", because it has no intelligence. You are making false arguments because evolution has no intelligence guiding it.I have to ask again, because I'm not sure why you are avoiding what is a reasonable, straightforward question:"Are you suggesting that when natural selection via predation favors brown mice over black mice on brown terrain, that there is supernatural intervention guiding the owls to the black mice?" Actually, I didn't say "you don't understand evolution." I said that "you don't seem to have a true understanding" of evolution. The reason you don't "seem" to understand is because you are personifying evolution with "goals" and "decisions" and "priorities", all of which are counter to the theory of evolution. Your arguments against evolution are not really against evolution, in other words - they are missing the mark. Hopefully you were not insulted by my statement that you don't appear to understand evolution, but I have nothing to go by other than your off-the-mark arguments. My intent in entering discussion with you has nothing to do with "winning" or "beating you" - I'd really like you to help understand what evolution is all about.Ignorance is not a bad thing, but willful ignorance, refusal to learn, is definitely a bad thing.Please let me know if you'd like to continue discussion - if so, I think a good place to start would be for you to give me a quick definition of the theory of evolution in your own words as a jumping-off point. If it turns out that you have a good understanding of evolution, then we can jump into arguments for ID and against evolution.Thanks.