Help me understand Intelligent Design (part 2)

Hi,BF, and welcome. I guess it`s all a matter of perspective. I can find all the poetry I want in the shape of DNA strands, magic in the changing composition of evolution, wonder at the remains of bacterial cohabitation in our cells, excitement as the complexity of life unfolds. These are concrete, viewable events unlike the retreat into delusion and its manifestations, attractive as they may be to a large percentage of our population.

I personally asked Prof Behe something when he came to a nearby university for a talk.I asked him what would he say to those critics who say that he has just decided that something is too complex so he throws up his hands and says "Oh well. It must be designed."He said his discision to adopt Intelligent Design was not based on what he didn't know but on what he did know.

Then it's too bad he's never laid that out somewhere. Did you ask him where you could find out what it is that he does know?

Sounds like you're assuming I didn't read his book before I met him.Anyway, before I went to see him I read his book Darwin's Black Box.I guess I got to it before the crowd warned me that it was a lousy read.

I think you should go and read the cross examination from the dover trial when Behe was cross examined. It is highly educational.There were a lot of claims that Behe made that showed he was very ignorant about the subject. For example, he made a claim no peer reviewed article was written. The lawyer cross examining him immedately came up with 50 articles that he placed on the table.The Dover trial exposed Behe as to his level of expertise. He also had to admit that astrology would have to be considered science with the defintion he used to say I.D> was science. Pretty devestating I would say

I would rather read specific rebuttals of his ideas presented in the book. And I already visited web sites where specific answers were alleged to be provided to Darwin's Black Box.Lawyers are paid to cleverly couch questions as to make you look like a fool. Big deal. For enough money that same lawyer could take the other side and make the other side look like qwacks.I'll get around to reading the proceedings. But I'm not too impressed with trick questions and clever legal tactics. Sorry, I don't think the man is a qwack. I just don't think that is the case.I'm a sofware developer like one of your other posters. And if someone told me that the algorithims and nested algorithims which make up the procedure and process of the continuity of biological systems indicated no intelligent design, I would question that.In the book he talks about following the evidence wherever it leads. I question if some scientists are really willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. I wonder if some of them say before hand that they do not want to go down a certain path because it may just lead them to where they do not want to go.I see the survival of biological systems to be very much like a program. It is extremly difficult for me to imagine a program to have created itself.Did you read the man's book?This message has been edited by jaywill, 12-20-2005 05:10 PMThis message has been edited by jaywill, 12-20-2005 05:13 PM

Most scientists are eager to follow the evidence where it leads. The problem for Behe, is that he doesn't have evidence that leads to where Behe would like to go.

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Impeach Bush.

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.

Pink S,I appreciate you putting a biological situation in terms more familiar to me. So you think that enough time of scrambling the bits on a harddrive without intellient input, could eventually arrive at the OS operating system?I can't easily believe that. It requires a huge amount of something like "faith" for lack of a better word, to believe that. What is selecting a desirable trial outcome, remembering it, and passing over undesireable trial results?In the example you use is there absolutely no standard that the random generation "knows" that it is trying to arrive at? A human being could conceivably carry out your experiment if one could live that long. But without intelligent human expectations what is it that "knows" when it is far away or close to the intended outcome?This message has been edited by jaywill, 12-21-2005 01:24 PMThis message has been edited by jaywill, 12-21-2005 01:25 PMThis message has been edited by jaywill, 12-21-2005 01:26 PMThis message has been edited by jaywill, 12-21-2005 01:30 PM

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.

Incidently, I corrected my comment because your analogy was scrambling all the bits on a harddrive.And I don't think I said no active program of some kind could be produced by random generation of bits. What process could arrive at a filter beforehand which "decides" what is "beneficial" and what is not?I think for such a filter to exist there has to be some kind of plan. I think any "filter" has to be programmed to "decide" the beneficial from the non-beneficial. Therefore there most be a "concept" of success and failure.Did that filter in biological terms itself evolve? Then what filter discriminated between success and failure in the development of the other filter?Do we have an infinite regress of filters developing other filters?The entire process of evolution itself - was it also arrived at through a trial of numerous other methods of process development?If you back up and back up and back up more and more I think the idea of intelligence is hard to avoid.The alternative is to take on some pseudo Buddhist view of the world that the success of the functionality is some kind of illusion. It is in reality a chaotic none meaningful mass of confusion with an illusion of purposefulness.It is alright to say "I don't know." If you say that you don't know I will not say that that proves anything. I would only say that if you don't know then why not let others propose alternative theories like ID? You said: Are you now saying that no component of the process at all is random? Then won't you then have to go back and correct this above statment?

For biological evolution, "beneficial" is simply a matter of what benefits the particular organism, as measured by its reproductive success. Thus "beneficial" is pragmatic and relative. What is beneficial to one organism might not be beneficial to another.The saying "the early bird gets the worm" describes a behavior that is beneficial to the bird but is not at all beneficial to the worm.

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Impeach Bush.

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.

I am not a biologist. But I think laymen have a right to weigh in on the discussion.The reproductive system of a bat is somewhat like that of a camel or a rhino or a human being.Something applied the same concept across the board to vastly different life forms. There was an overall sense of "benefit" which could be duplicated for many different kinds of organisms apparently.This speaks to me of a plan. This speaks to me of a concept of a useful template that can be imposed repeatedly on different species.The indication of intelligence is very strong. How have we arrived at a point where the suggestion of such is hooted down?

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?