Is Intelligent Design Religion in the Guise of Science?

Every fossil can be considered a transitional form. Sometimes those transitions went nowhere, sometimes they were passed on with success.

All we actually know is that they died -not that they came from any other form that doesn't look the same. The belief that evolution happened is the only reason you imagine any one creature gave birth step by step to any other creature that is fundamentally different.
Dogs produce dogs produce dogs -that's the reality. You believe, based on indoctrination, and pure faith thereafter, that somehow bacteria eventually gave rise, step by step, to brain surgeons.That's not science. Stick with the facts.

Every fossil can be considered a transitional form.

Yes and its parent looked somewhat like it and so did its descendants if it had any.That much you know for sure. The rest is
based on a belief that small changes will add up to a big overall change eventually.You choose to be believe that based on guesswork -I choose not to based on empirical science -you know observation etc.
Darwin didn't think he'd shown convincingly that macro evolution had happened -he thought that future finds of endless transitionals of a more convincing kind would improve the picture only it got worse.
Why the need for a theory of punctuated equilibrium if the transitionals were so convincing?
That theory just draws attention to the problem -the billions of missing links that would really convince us that gradualism works.
The yawning gaps between different body types, their sudden appearance in all complexity in the fossil record and the lack of evidence for how they got there in the first place.

Stephen Jay Gould said "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

Well I suppose that makes him a fool for not agreeing with you even though he really believed in evolution -hence 'punctuated equilibrium' as a way out of the quandry.
Luckily now we don't have to look for transitional forms because the nagging problem will never be solved so everything is a transitional form -end of problem!

Morton's Toe, which is having one's second toe be larger than the hallux, was present in less than 5% of caucasians during the 1950's. It is now over double that and within some caucasian populations as much as five times that. And this is just one genetic trait over the course of half a century(thanks bluegenes). Imagine, then, the sum total of our traits and how quickly they can morph us. Slow by our own reckoning, but not by geological time. A longer toe here, an increase of rubidism there, it all adds up.

And this genetic mutation convinces you that sometime future -we will be morphed into something completely different!That's faith for you with time being the magical element that prevents us from empirically proving any of this.Maybe I understand evolution better than you do or perhaps I just lack imagination.

Beretta replying to faust writes: Every fossil can be considered a transitional form. Sometimes those transitions went nowhere, sometimes they were passed on with success. All we actually know is that they died -not that they came from any other form that doesn't look the same.

This is a strange statement to make since obviously a fossil tells us much, much more than just "something died". The question isn't whether or not the evidence exists, because it most certainly does, but what the evidence tells us.

The belief that evolution happened is the only reason you imagine any one creature gave birth step by step to any other creature that is fundamentally different.

Actually, it is ID that is based upon religious beliefs and not upon any evidence. Acceptance of the theory of evolution is based upon mountains of evidence from the natural world.

The rest is based on a belief that small changes will add up to a big overall change eventually.You choose to be believe that based on guesswork - I choose not to based on empirical science - you know observation etc.

This is again a strange thing to say. There is no body of empirical scientific evidence that argues against small changes accumulating over time into larger changes. Rather, the exact opposite is the case, as the evidence argues strongly for this conclusion.

Darwin didn't think he'd shown convincingly that macro evolution had happened -he thought that future finds of endless transitionals of a more convincing kind would improve the picture only it got worse.

The opposite is the case as the sketchy picture of common descent outlined by the fossils available to Darwin has been improved thousands of times over through the wealth of fossils discovered since that time.

Why the need for a theory of punctuated equilibrium if the transitionals were so convincing?

It depends upon what type of transitionals you're asking about. If you're asking about transitionals between the higher classifications such as family and order, then there are enormous numbers of transitional fossils.

But if you're asking about transitionals at the lower classifications such as genus and species, then there are fewer examples of transitionals, not as many as expected. Often times distinct new species just suddenly appear in the fossil record without any apparent closely related predecessors. Punctuated equilibrium is an attempt to address this issue.

You mention Gould, and naturally Gould doesn't agree with you. Your out-of-context quote is the common one that appears at literally hundreds of creationist websites. This has been corrected so many times that it isn't worth doing so again, so I'll mention something that is closely related.

Gould's punctuated equilibria ideas were not original. He merely applied George Gaylord Simpson's ideas about evolution, best described in his book Tempo and Mode in Evolution, to the paleontological fossil record. Gould never hid this fact, and in fact made significant contributions to promoting Simpson's ideas, but he over emphasized the significance of his own contribution in this regard, which I think in retrospect, and even at the time, can be regarded as modest.

And this genetic mutation convinces you that sometime future -we will be morphed into something completely different!That's faith for you with time being the magical element that prevents us from empirically proving any of this. Maybe I understand evolution better than you do or perhaps I just lack imagination.

The fact of imperfect reproduction guarantees that all species *will* change over time.

--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Fix garbled transitional explanation.

Edited by Percy, : Additional fixes to transitional explanation.

Your whole post is off topic.

Dogs produce dogs produce dogs -that's the reality.

This is actually the subject of another thread made to answer this question from you on yet another thread ...

Click to enlarge

You haven't responded yet to Re: Example - Part 1: comparison of dog and eohippus skeleton, message 16, and where I have posted a more complete answer to you in message 33.

Don't you think it is rather disingenuous of you to make this claim again without dealing with the evidence on the thread in question ... one you have left, just when we get to the evidence? Is it too hard to deal with reality?

Enjoy.

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The belief that evolution happened is the only reason you imagine any one creature gave birth step by step to any other creature that is fundamentally different.

We have been over this falsehood several times, most recently in the Conclusion vs Presupposition. Evolution is a conclusion based on the evidence and not a presupposition.

It is time you stopped repeating that falsehood.

Stephen Jay Gould said "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution." Well I suppose that makes him a fool for not agreeing with you even though he really believed in evolution -hence 'punctuated equilibrium' as a way out of the quandry. Luckily now we don't have to look for transitional forms because the nagging problem will never be solved so everything is a transitional form -end of problem!

Glad that you mentioned this falsehood as well so we can correct it for you and you will stop repeating it.

That quote is simply another example of the dishonesty of Biblical Creationists. The folk that pulled that quote out of context had access obviously to ALL that Gould said, yet they pulled that one piece out of context to try to con gullible folk like you.

Why do they continue to lie?

The full quote is:

Gould writes: " 2. The saltational initiation of major transitions: The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary states between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution. St. George Mivart (1871), Darwin's most cogent critic, referred to it as the dilemma of "the incipient stages of useful structures" -- of what possible benefit to a reptile is two percent of a wing? The dilemma has two potential solutions. The first, preferred by Darwinians because it preserves both gradualism and adaptation, is the principle of preadaptation: the intermediate stages functioned in another way but were, by good fortune in retrospect, pre-adapted to a new role they could play only after greater elaboration. Thus, if feathers first functioned "for" insulation and later "for" the trapping of insect prey (Ostrom 1979) a proto-wing might be built without any reference to flight. I do not doubt the supreme importance of preadaptation, but the other alternative, treated with caution, reluctance, disdain or even fear by the modern synthesis, now deserves a rehearing in the light of renewed interest in development: perhaps, in many cases, the intermediates never existed. I do not refer to the saltational origin of entire new designs, complete in all their complex and integrated features -- a fantasy that would be truly anti-Darwinian in denying any creativity to selection and relegating it to the role of eliminating new models. Instead, I envisage a potential saltational origin for the essential features of key adaptations. Why may we not imagine that gill arch bones of an ancestral agnathan moved forward in one step to surround the mouth and form proto-jaws? Such a change would scarcely establish the Bauplan of the gnathostomes. So much more must be altered in the reconstruction of agnathan design -- the building of a true shoulder girdle with bony, paired appendages, to say the least. But the discontinuous origin of a proto-jaw might set up new regimes of development and selection that would quickly lead to other, coordinated modifications." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, pp. 126-127) source

Not only is it an example of Biblical Creationists dishonesty, it is also from 1980, and quite a bit has been learned since then.

Finally, none of that has ANYTHING to do with the topic which is "Is Intelligent Design Religion in the Guise of Science?" and which you have already answered in the affirmative. You already admitted that ID is nothing but religion in Message 77 when you said:

I'll go with the God of the Bible but the actual overall point of the debate is "can blind chance and mutation produce everything we see?

when asked "Who is the Designer.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Beretta writes: The rest is based on a belief that small changes will add up to a big overall change eventually.You choose to be believe that based on guesswork -I choose not to based on empirical science -you know observation etc.

If a small amount of water falls over a waterfall in one second, it does not require any great faith to come to the conclusion that a much larger amount, about sixty times, will fall over it in a minute, and that the small "one second" amount calculated over centuries or millennia will add up to an enormous amount.

If you can observe a groove in the rock where the waterfall goes over it, and sand deposits originating from that particular type of rock further downstream, you can combine that information with the many other observations (a word you like to use) that tell us that water erodes rock, and come to the conclusion that the water has been, is, and will be eroding the rock.

All very simple, even for a creationist. We then know that the waterfall is constantly changing its shape and its nature. Even though the changes are imperceptible over a short period of time, over a long period of time, the groove could become a gully, or a ravine, and the waterfall could change from going in a one stage drop over a cliff to being a series of small waterfalls, or rapids.

Common sense, and in keeping with all other observations of small changes adding up to larger ones.

Yet you seem to want to make a bizzare exception in biology, and to describe a phenomenon (small changes adding up to large changes, which is so normal as to be seen by thinking people as common sense) as requiring faith:

Berretta writes: The belief that evolution happened is the only reason you imagine any one creature gave birth step by step to any other creature that is fundamentally different.

You clearly don't realise it, but you may as well try to argue that waterfalls do not change over time; that they were created as they are, and will remain as they are, and that the small scale erosion we observe can never become large scale erosion. Is part of of your creationist mantra "a waterfall will always be a waterfall and can never become a series of rapids, or a level stream running through a canyon"?

Bringing this round closer to the topic of I.D. which the thread's supposed to be about, your creationist arguments are not in agreement with some of the arguments put forward by the modern I.D. movement. People like Behe accept that at least some organisms change into others without requiring the intervention of invisible designers.

You seem to be more in tune with some young earthers, who think that organisms do evolve into other organisms, but only within "kinds". There's a magical limitation on degree of change allowed in both forms of creationism, but the I.D.ers generally seem to set that limit much higher. All limitations are arbitrary, because none of them are evidence based, so creationism as a whole will never be able to decide what the intelligent designer does and doesn't do.

Perhaps a waterfall could become two or three smaller waterfalls in your God's world, but isn't allowed to become rapids? But the I.D.ers might allow it to become rapids, but never to wear the rock right down into a level stream bed in a canyon.:rolleyes:

Edited by bluegenes, : typo

If a small amount of water falls over a waterfall in one second, it does not require any great faith to come to the conclusion that a much larger amount, about sixty times, will fall over it in a minute, and that the small "one second" amount calculated over centuries or millennia will add up to an enormous amount.

I understand your argument but just don't think the analogy is suitable for the occasion. The process that you outline is easy to see and its possibilities are easy to imagine but can you so easily extend it to biological evolution using the evidence that we have at our disposal?

The first problem would be with the geological time frame. If you believe as most geologists do that it is representative of time (due to uniformatarian assumptions) then obviously it looks like these large changes must have occurred -so "they weren't there and now, with time, they are." But how about looking back at those assumptions in the first place.

Then - you can breed a mongrel mutt into large dogs or small dogs with time and selection but is there a limit to what you can produce, even given time to accomplish the task.If you breed small, you lose genetic information for large. The whole process involves getting rid of the information you do not require.
How much useful new information will you get that is available to morph that dog into a completely new kind of creature?
Empirical science only shows that we will get a dog of some kind; same thing with fruit flies forced to mutate rapidly through many generations -did they morph, in some ways but only in negative and destructive ways because that is mostly what mutation does -but they are clearly all fruit flies so can new and useful genetic information build up as a result of mutation over time -we don't know that empirically.

So we have no absolute evidence that these large scale changes supposedly represented by the geological column are possible and it is not ironclad that the geological column equals time.

Just because a toe can change and become longer and its appearance in the population increases in frequency with time, that doesn't tell us where the toe information came from in the first place. We can see a mutation of information being transmitted through the generations and maybe imagine the long term morph of the entire human but it is based on believing that it has happened in the past, not on empirical science with repetition and observation.

All very simple, even for a creationist. We then know that the waterfall is constantly changing its shape and its nature.

But your example is easily imaginable even for creationists who must clearly be credited with having no imagination. The sorts of changes we are comparing to, biologically speaking, are the reptile to bird types of changes where somehow the info for feathers and hollow bones and a new and completely different lung structure and circulatory system and nerve innervation to allow the new assets to do their job,built up to produce an entirely new kind of creature with entirely new abilities.This is rather difficult to imagine. Such perfection, such a random mechanism like mutation, no plan, just voila take that.
We have no testable scientific reason to believe this.

People like Behe accept that at least some organisms change into others without requiring the intervention of invisible designers.

I agree that Behe accepts that concept but there are a whole range of individual beliefs accepted within ID. The point of ID is not the theological belief systems of the individual but instead the disbelief really that a mechanism such as random mutation could have invented or put together the marvels of nature in the first place. Not one of its adherents disbelieve in the concept of random mutation and selection, they just question the origin of the initial genetic information and most question the limits of change that are possible given what we can know and test and demonstrate empirically.

There's a magical limitation on degree of change allowed in both forms of creationism

Yes and it's based on what we can demonstrate to happen in a general sense, sans the imaginative aspects.We can't prove that a reptile became a bird with time but we can see that a type of reptile may demonstrate variability within the genetic features that it possesses in its first appearance within the geological record - so a leg may be lost or changed or duplicated or changed but empirically we cannot account for a leg becoming a wing or acquiring feathers where there were once scales.

All limitations are arbitrary, because none of them are evidence based

Actually in the sense of what I have explained above, the limitations of creationists are far more evidence-based than the evolutionists limitations, which seem to be pretty much unlimited given what they believe is possible mutation-wise.

Perhaps a waterfall could become two or three smaller waterfalls in your God's world, but isn't allowed to become rapids?

Or perhaps we only object when the waterfall morphs into a bird and no clear link is imaginable.

Beretta writes: I'll go with the God of the Bible You already admitted that ID is nothing but religion when asked "Who is the Designer.

So by inference anyone that believes in the God of the Bible and dares to admit is, is unscientific. Any conclusions that person may accept or reject are then based on religion which makes that person dishonest because it is 'religion in disguise.'

What do you believe?

Gould writes: The first, preferred by Darwinians because it preserves both gradualism and adaptation, is the principle of preadaptation: the intermediate stages functioned in another way but were, by good fortune in retrospect, pre-adapted to a new role they could play only after greater elaboration.

So Gould lays out the problem which is real and then proceeds to come up with an imaginative solution or two and that makes the problem disappear? His imaginative potential solutions are not what we care about -there's no proof, it's not science. What is being quoted, which is not at all out of context nor misrepresented is the problem which many evolutionists have admitted, exists.

Gould writes: Why may we not imagine that gill arch bones of an ancestral agnathan moved forward in one step to surround the mouth and form proto-jaws?

There we go, the 'imagine' word again. Well imagine away but don't accuse creationists of being inventive and going beyond the bounds of what is scientific.

none of that has ANYTHING to do with the topic which is "Is Intelligent Design Religion in the Guise of Science?"

Personally I think it does, except to point out that it seems to me that ID proposes a manner of sticking to the science by critically examining what we know and what we believe to be true by faith. We actually want to impose a limit on how much imagination should be allowed by the faithful of the imaginative evolution religion and show people how to think critically rather than be told that evolution (macro) happened, it's a FACT, you HAVE to believe us even though we've never seen it happen.They want to be allowed to propose an alternative that is equally possible but which you may reject if you feel so inclined, but not on account of the evidence against it, since neither can be proven as it is history.

Evolution is a conclusion based on the evidence and not a presupposition.

No it is an imaginative tale produced by men based on the facts that we possess. ID proponents work with those same facts and come to a different conclusion.Neither can be proven -which is more likely -that is the question? Do not force the one possible solution down our children's throats as fact - present both sides and while you're doing it, don't force feed either as truth.What anyone may choose to believe will not change the reality of what is true but lets separate fact from philosophy and divide empirical science from imagination.

jar writes:

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That quote is simply another example of the dishonesty of Biblical Creationists. The folk that pulled that quote out of context had access obviously to ALL that Gould said, yet they pulled that one piece out of context to try to con gullible folk like you.

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Don't forget: Here is Gould's statement from Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes to those who misquote him:

We [Gould and Eldredge] proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the differential success of certain kind of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuations and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane. Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether though design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled "Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution is a Hoax" states: "The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge...are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God revealed to us in the Bible." Continuing the distortion, several creationists have equated the theory of punctuated equilibrium with a caricature of the beliefs of Richard Goldschmidt, a great early geneticist. Goldschmidt argued, in a famous book published in 1949, that new groups can arise all at once through major mutations. He referred to these suddenly transformed creatures as "hopeful monsters." (I am attracted to some aspects of the non-caricatured version, but Goldschmidt's theory still has nothing to do with punctuated equilibrium—see essays in section 3 and my explicit essay on Goldschmidt in The Panda's Thumb.) Creationist Luther Sunderland talks of the "punctuated equilibrium hopeful monster theory" and tells his hopeful readers that "it amounts to tacit admission that anti-evolutionists are correct in asserting there is no fossil evidence supporting the theory that all life is connected to a common ancestor." Duane Gish writes, "According to Goldschmidt, and now apparently according to Gould, a reptile laid an egg from which the first bird, feathers and all, was produced." Any evolutionist who believed such nonsense would rightly be laughed off the intellectual stage; yet the only theory that could ever envision such a scenario for the origin of birds is creationism—with God acting in the egg.

Quote mining is nothing new for creationists.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Beretta writes:

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So by inference anyone that believes in the God of the Bible and dares to admit is, is unscientific.

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Close, but not quite. Instead, anyone who uses beliefs to justify their analysis rather than evidence is unscientific.

Science involves what is seen despite your beliefs, not because of them.

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What do you believe?

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It doesn't matter. Science works despite your beliefs, not because of them.

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So Gould lays out the problem which is real and then proceeds to come up with an imaginative solution or two and that makes the problem disappear?

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And what did he say afterwards? You quoted a single sentence. Gould did not speak in single sentences.

Hint: The quote you mined is from a larger discussion that actually denies the attempt to come up with "imaginative" things.

quote:

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There we go, the 'imagine' word again. Well imagine away but don't accuse creationists of being inventive and going beyond the bounds of what is scientific.

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Here's a thought: Let's "imagine" you provide full quotes in complete context.

Quick: What was the source of the two sentences you quote-mined?

Here's the sentence that comes directly after the second sentence you quote-mined:

Such a change would scarcely establish the Bauplan of the gnathostomes.

Hmmm...sounds like Gould is tearing down the idea that it is just an "imaginative solution." It is, he directly states, not enough. There are too many other factors involved.

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show people how to think critically rather than be told that evolution (macro) happened, it's a FACT, you HAVE to believe us even though we've never seen it happen.

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Except that we have. Why do you want us to lie to people?

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Neither can be proven

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Except evolution has. That's why we have a theory of it. That's the entire point behind theories: They explain facts. You cannot have a theory [I][B]OF[/i][/B] evolution until you have observed evolution upon which to base the theory.

Since you are so fond of Gould, you should know about the essay he wrote, Evolution as Fact and Theory.

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don't force feed either as truth.

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But one is. In fact, you can demonstrate one right in front of your eyes in a simple way that can be done in a typical high school biology lab. It doesn't cost much and you can get the materials from any reputable biological supply house.

Take a single E. coli bacterium of K-type. This means the bacterium is susceptible to T4 phage. Let this bacterium reproduce until it forms a lawn. Then, infect the lawn with T4 phage.

What do we expect to happen? That's right, plaques should start to form and, eventually, the entire lawn will die. After all, every single bacterium in the lawn is descended from a single ancestor, so if the ancestor is susceptible, then all the offspring should be susceptible, too.

But what we actually see is that some colonies of bacteria in the lawn are not affected by the phage.

How can this be? Again, the entire lawn is descended from a single ancestor. They should all behave identically. If one is susceptible, then they're all susceptible. If one is immune, then they're all immune. This can't be an example of "adaptation" because if one could do it, they all could do it.

But since there is a discrepancy, we are left with only one conclusion: The bacteria evolved. There must be a genetic difference between the bacteria that are surviving and those that died.

Indeed, we call the new bacteria K-4 because they are immune to T4 phage.

But we're not done. Take a single K-4 bacterium and repeat the process: Let it reproduce to form a lawn and then infect the lawn with T4 phage.

What do we expect to happen? That's right: Absolutely nothing. All of the bacteria are descended from a single ancestor that is immune to T4 phage. Therefore, they all should survive and we shouldn't see any plaques form.

But we do. Plaques do, indeed start to form. How can this be? Again, all the bacteria in the lawn are descended from a single ancestor that was immune to T4 phage, so they should all behave identically. If one is immune, then all are immune. There must be something else going on.

Something evolved, but the question is what. What evolved? Could it be the bacteria experiencing a reversion mutation back to K-type? No, that can't be it. Suppose any given bacteria did revert back to wild. It is surrounded by K-4 type who are immune to T4 phage. As soon as the lawn is infected, those few bacteria will die and immediately be replaced by the offspring of the immune K-4 bacteria. We would never see any plaques forming because the immune bacteria keep filling in any holes that appear.

So if it isn't the bacteria that evolved, it must be the phage. And, indeed, we call the new phage T4h as it has evolved a new host specificity.

There is a similar experiment where you take bacteria that have had their lactose operons removed and they evolve to be able to digest lactose again.

You might want to look up the information regarding the development of bacteria capable of digesting nylon oligimers. It's the result of a single frame-shift mutation.

So since we can see the fact of evolution happen right in front of our eyes, why on earth would you want us to lie about it?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Beretta writes: The first problem would be with the geological time frame. If you believe as most geologists do that it is representative of time (due to uniformatarian assumptions) then obviously it looks like these large changes must have occurred -so "they weren't there and now, with time, they are." But how about looking back at those assumptions in the first place.

ID doesn't have any problem with the geological time frame. And ID also understands that modern geology is not based upon "uniformitarian assumptions" as creationists understand that term.

Are you arguing for a YEC timeframe? This is an ID thread.

Then - you can breed a mongrel mutt into large dogs or small dogs with time and selection but is there a limit to what you can produce, even given time to accomplish the task.If you breed small, you lose genetic information for large. The whole process involves getting rid of the information you do not require.

ID accepts common descent and believes that evolution was responsible for much of the diversity of life we see today.

You seem to be arguing for creationist YEC views, so I think you're in the wrong thread, but I'll address the rest of your post anyway.

Empirical science only shows that we will get a dog of some kind; same thing with fruit flies forced to mutate rapidly through many generations -did they morph, in some ways but only in negative and destructive ways because that is mostly what mutation does -but they are clearly all fruit flies so can new and useful genetic information build up as a result of mutation over time -we don't know that empirically.

Science is based upon empiricism, meaning that the process of discovery is based upon observations of the real world. It doesn't mean, "Anything that doesn't happen before your very eyes didn't happen." It also doesn't mean, "Extrapolation is invalid."

Creationists argue for these strange ways of thinking when they would never consider using them in their own lives. Extrapolating effects forward in time is something everyone does, a household budget is one very simple example. And figuring out what happened in the past just by looking around is also something everyone does, as any parent whose ever come home and found the living room lamp broken can attest.

In other words, all we're talking about is rational thinking, and creationists only argue against it when it leads to conclusions that conflict with their religious beliefs. They have no problem with rational thinking in all other aspects of their lives.

So we have no absolute evidence that these large scale changes supposedly represented by the geological column are possible and it is not ironclad that the geological column equals time.

If your use of adjectives like "absolute" and "ironclad" is intended to imply 100% certainty, then you are correct. Science is tentative and can never be absolute or ironclad or 100% certain about anything, not in physics, not in chemistry, not in geology, not in biology, not in any field of science.

All science can do is offer evidence in support of a hypothesis, and if that hypothesis is verified through a process of experiment, observation, analysis, replication and prediction validation then it becomes accepted as theory. Nowhere during this process does anything become absolute or ironclad or 100% certain. But it does become the best understanding we have of the natural world at the time.

...but it is based on believing that it has happened in the past, not on empirical science with repetition and observation.

This is another example of misusing the word "empirical." All accepted scientific theories are empirical in that they're based upon study of the real world.

Such perfection, such a random mechanism like mutation, no plan, just voila take that. We have no testable scientific reason to believe this.

You're forgetting selection, which has a much smaller random component than mutation. But the important point here is that the theory of evolution explains the evidence, has been tested innumerable times and has passed every test. We have no scientific reasons for questioning the theory.

I agree that Behe accepts that concept but there are a whole range of individual beliefs accepted within ID.

I think there are many individuals who don't understand ID very well. The ID tent is much smaller than you seem to believe. Behe and Dembski and Meyer (Discovery Institute) are all very clear that ID accepts an ancient earth and the principles of evolution. This is why organizations like ICR (Institute for Creation Research, a YEC organization) have come out respectfully against ID.

You go on to describe the core ID belief that the processes of random mutation and natural selection are insufficient for explaining the diversity of life, and this is a scientifically valid hypothesis, but the ID community has not as yet been able to offer any evidence in its support.

--Percy

Beretta writes: So by inference anyone that believes in the God of the Bible and dares to admit is, is unscientific.

In a scientific setting, those who offer religious explanations unsupported by empirical evidence are being unscientific.

Creationists have this weird idea that one can't be religious unless it infuses all parts of their lives, as if someone couldn't be a plumber if he insisted on playing golf with a golf club instead of a monkey wrench. Most people have no problem using thinking appropriate to the problem. No one would consider applying their checker knowledge to a chess game, and why creationists think they should bring their religious thinking to scientific problems is beyond me.

What is being quoted, which is not at all out of context nor misrepresented is the problem which many evolutionists have admitted, exists.

:eek:

Rrhain provided the full Gould quote. The irony is that the omitted portion includes Gould's complaint about creationists quoting him out of context. Ain't evidence a bitch?

Gould writes: Why may we not imagine that gill arch bones of an ancestral agnathan moved forward in one step to surround the mouth and form proto-jaws? There we go, the 'imagine' word again. Well imagine away but don't accuse creationists of being inventive and going beyond the bounds of what is scientific.

Gould is posing a hypothetical question so that he can argue against it, as he goes on to do. You've just done what you've been arguing creationists do not do, lifted a quote out of context to make it seem that Gould is arguing for the opposite of what he actually believes. Oh the irony!

Personally I think it does, except to point out that it seems to me that ID proposes a manner of sticking to the science by critically examining what we know and what we believe to be true by faith. We actually want to impose a limit on how much imagination should be allowed by the faithful of the imaginative evolution religion and show people how to think critically rather than be told that evolution (macro) happened, it's a FACT, you HAVE to believe us even though we've never seen it happen.They want to be allowed to propose an alternative that is equally possible but which you may reject if you feel so inclined, but not on account of the evidence against it, since neither can be proven as it is history.

This paragraph contains so much fiction as to defy concise analysis, so I'll just provide the correct information.

Evolution is a very widely accepted theory supported by mountains of evidence that has undergone countless validations.

ID is a religious concept which has yet to offer any evidence, which does not engage in active research, which has separated and isolated itself from the very scientific community that could provide the review, analysis, feedback and replication they need to qualify as science, and which engages primarily in efforts to gain through political means the scientific status they've failed to earn by doing actual science.

--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Fix grammar in last paragraph.

Edited by Percy, : One last grammar item.

And as usual the Biblical Creationists response is to misrepresent what has been said.

So by inference anyone that believes in the God of the Bible and dares to admit is, is unscientific. Any conclusions that person may accept or reject are then based on religion which makes that person dishonest because it is 'religion in disguise.'

No, that is NOT what I said, but like Biblical Creationists before you have done, just another perversion of the truth like they did with the Gould quote.

What is being quoted, which is not at all out of context nor misrepresented is the problem which many evolutionists have admitted, exists.

Yet another misrepresentation of the truth. When you present only part of the evidence, withhold data as you do in the Gould Quote, that is called a "Sin of Omission." Science has standards of ethics and when a scientist is caught in such behavior they are sanctioned severely, often with total loss of any future employment in the sciences and certainly every piece of work they have ever done is called into question.

It is sad that there does not seem to be any standard of ethics in Biblical Creationism or ID.

And finally we touch on the topic.

We actually want to impose a limit on how much imagination should be allowed by the faithful of the imaginative evolution religion and show people how to think critically rather than be told that evolution (macro) happened, it's a FACT, you HAVE to believe us even though we've never seen it happen.

Once again you misrepresent truth. Evolution has been seen to happen and you have been given examples of that. Macro evolution can certainly be supported and explained by the existing TOE and is an unavoidable conclusion based on the evidence.

BUT you also once again show that Intelligent Design is nothing but Religion in the Guise of Science.

---

Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Beretta writes: I understand your argument but just don't think the analogy is suitable for the occasion. The process that you outline is easy to see and its possibilities are easy to imagine but can you so easily extend it to biological evolution using the evidence that we have at our disposal?

Very easily. What I'm pointing out is that lots of small changes adding up to large changes is the norm. The whole point is that you are deciding, with complete lack of reason, to make an exception for biology. Look at the history of anything, a country, a mountain range, a river, a human culture, your own life from birth to present, whatever you want, and you see that constant small changes add up to large changes.

Beretta writes: The first problem would be with the geological time frame. If you believe as most geologists do that it is representative of time (due to uniformatarian assumptions) then obviously it looks like these large changes must have occurred -so "they weren't there and now, with time, they are." But how about looking back at those assumptions in the first place.

By a vague "most" geologists, I think you mean more than 99%, and I'd suggest a virtual 100% of those from cultures that do not indoctrinate children with Jewish mythology as truth. If you're questioning the physics of dating methods, the modern I.D. movement doesn't do that.

The only assumption underlying science is that reality can be observed.

Beretta writes: Then - you can breed a mongrel mutt into large dogs or small dogs with time and selection but is there a limit to what you can produce, even given time to accomplish the task.If you breed small, you lose genetic information for large. The whole process involves getting rid of the information you do not require.

There's no known limit to what you could breed, other than that it would be a DNA based creature. Nature requires far longer than the time that we've been breeding dogs for two different populations of the same mammal to diverge into clearly separate species, so it's hard to see what point you think you're making here. Your last sentence seems to imply that wolves, from which dogs were bred, have all the attributes of all dogs. Can wolves be as big and strong and intelligent as St, Bernards, run as fast as greyhounds, follow scent as well as bloodhounds, and win a fight with a Rottweiler? Really?

It appears that lots of "information" has been added to dogs, and artificial breeding, like evolution in the wild, is a matter of both adding and subtracting characteristics. Genetic mutations do both.

Beratta writes: Empirical science only shows that we will get a dog of some kind; same thing with fruit flies forced to mutate rapidly through many generations -did they morph, in some ways but only in negative and destructive ways because that is mostly what mutation does -but they are clearly all fruit flies so can new and useful genetic information build up as a result of mutation over time -we don't know that empirically.

With fruit flies, you can get about 30 generations a year, and I haven't heard of an experiment that's gone on for more than a few years, let's say five, which is 150 generations. In the wild, for a fruit fly to become something that is not a fruit fly, you'd be talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of generations.

Now, look at your question/statement that I've put in bold. Dogs have been bred for thousands of generations, so think about my comments above. Think about the most intelligent breeds of dogs, and ask yourself whether or not an increase in the intelligence of wolves is "new and useful information built up as a result of mutation over time" and whether or not we know that empirically.

Beratta writes: So we have no absolute evidence that these large scale changes supposedly represented by the geological column are possible and it is not ironclad that the geological column equals time.

I think Percy has already commented on your "iron clad" type terminology, but I'll add something different. In the case of your creator God and his supposed creation, it isn't a question of "no absolute evidence", it's a question of absolutely no evidence at all, giving your beliefs the scientific ranking of garden fairies and the man in the moon. I strongly suggest that you apply the same level of cynicism to all creation mythologies that you apply to the scientific consencus of our times (but I know that this'll conflict with desire, so you won't:)).

Beretta writes: We can see a mutation of information being transmitted through the generations and maybe imagine the long term morph of the entire human but it is based on believing that it has happened in the past, not on empirical science with repetition and observation.

Not at all. Such imagination is useful for forming a speculative hypothesis, but it doesn't make for a theory. A collection of fossils, like the horse ancestors/ancestor relatives, are examined and measured up by paleontologists and anatomists in the present, and the process can certainly be repeated and it is certainly observation. At the same time, mutations can be observed all over the genomes of our own species and others. You have your own individual ones that you did not inherit. We all do.

Use the evolutionary imagination, and it might tell you that because we have much larger brains then the other apes, creatures with brains larger than theirs but smaller than ours must have existed along the line in between. But the observation and evidence comes with looking at ancient skulls with brain cases considerably larger than those of the other apes, but considerably smaller than our own, and sure enough, these exist. Coincidence?

To bring this round to the topic, the I.D.ers are religious creationists like yourself, but they tend to have a better understanding of science than biblical literalists, and they know that they have to fit creationism around the ever growing body of evidence that shouts "evolution", like the things I'm mentioning here.

But your example is easily imaginable even for creationists who must clearly be credited with having no imagination. The sorts of changes we are comparing to, biologically speaking, are the reptile to bird types of changes where somehow the info for feathers and hollow bones and a new and completely different lung structure and circulatory system and nerve innervation to allow the new assets to do their job,built up to produce an entirely new kind of creature with entirely new abilities.This is rather difficult to imagine. Such perfection, such a random mechanism like mutation, no plan, just voila take that. We have no testable scientific reason to believe this.

You seem to be transferring a creation type view onto evolution, in a sense. What mutations do is produce variety within a species, which is why you and I do not have identical bones, lungs, circulatory system, etc. You can doubt mutations that significantly change bones, if you want to, but look at this:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/03/980316045046.htm

That's a particularly interesting mutation, because it produces three measurable characteristics, one advantageous (strong bones) one neutral (curly kinky hair) and one disadvantageous (shitty teeth). But the point is that these kind of things happen all the time in all animals, most of them uselessly neutral or negative, but all together, producing considerable variety.

From a dinosaur to a modern bird would be something that happens over millions of generations, and don't you think it odd that we find fossils of dinosaurs with apparent feather like structures, and things that look like birds, but with dinosaur like characteristics, including teeth? Is it really the devil out to fool scientists, or would you admit that there might be the teensiest little possibility that your creation that leaves no evidence might just be a superstition that never happened?

When you say:

Such perfection, such a random mechanism like mutation, no plan, just voila take that.

It shows that you see mutation, correctly, as random, but that you don't understand natural selection. As I say, you get enormous variety within a species, but the fact that organisms have to be fit in order to survive, reproduce, and pass on their genes always leads to an enormous prejudice in favour of useful characteristics.

The end result can look very clever, but exactly the same thing happens with the random change and selection programs used to design airplanes.

I agree that Behe accepts that concept but there are a whole range of individual beliefs accepted within ID. The point of ID is not the theological belief systems of the individual but instead the disbelief really that a mechanism such as random mutation could have invented or put together the marvels of nature in the first place. Not one of its adherents disbelieve in the concept of random mutation and selection, they just question the origin of the initial genetic information and most question the limits of change that are possible given what we can know and test and demonstrate empirically.

They want magical origins for the marvels of nature, but they have no evidence that magic happens, so they're a bit stuck from a scientific point of view.:)

Or perhaps we only object when the waterfall morphs into a bird and no clear link is imaginable.

As you're a believer in the supernatural, surely waterfalls into birds should be easy for you. Just like changing a rib into a woman, or a woman into a pillar of salt, you don't need links, just a click of the creator's fingers, and all is explained.

Who needs science for explanations?

Beretta writes: ..., the limitations of creationists are far more evidence-based than the evolutionists limitations...

Hey, this would be a great time to give us that missing I.D. hypothesis. Come on, Beretta, give it a whirl.

And what do we have here? Bacteria mutated into bacteria with a mutation.So we have bacteria at the beginning and bacteria at the end.
Should we then believe that bacteria will ever be anything but bacteria?
That's called variation. If you want to call it evolution -then fine, it is micro-evolution and it does not imply that macro-evolution is possible.
Science tells us bacteria can mutate within a range -full stop.

Believing that bacteria could mutate into something other than bacteria would be philosophy not science. You have to believe it but that's not science.