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To: MissAmericanPie
"There is at least at much for ID as Evolution, neither can be proved is my point so why should science take a position, when the arguments are flying inside the scientific community on the meaing of the evidence?"

You really haven't compared the evidence have you?

So far, the main source for ID research, the Discovery Institute, has not produced any research. All they have done is claimed that complexity such as we see in the genome of any given organism is highly complex, too complex to be the product of random events. They then go on to define complexity as an exclusive product of intelligence (unconvincingly I might add) so that genomic complexity must be the result of an intelligence. In effect what they have done is to perform 'research by definition' where their definition is both a premise and the conclusion.

Science is not in the business of proving their theories but in accumulating and analyzing data which is then tested within the bounds of applicable theories. Because there may in the future be improvements in testing technology, or new evidence may require modification to current conclusions, every conclusion in science is viewed as a 'fluid' level of confidence.

Aside from the scientists belonging to one creationist faction or another, there is really very little contention within the science community about the existence of evolution. There is little argument about the existence of evolutionary mechanisms, what is in depute is the relative influence each mechanism has on the totality of evolution. Some believe selection is of prime import, others believe drift has more of an impact. Some accept that natural selection is sufficient and necessary for 'macro-evolution' (the scientific definition, not the creationist definition), others claim selection alone is not enough.

The main point is that even those arguing the mechanisms accept the 'variation of allele frequencies within a population due to differential reproductive rates', 'descent with modification' and common descent.

274 posted on 04/19/2006 12:21:48 PM PDT by b_sharp (A lack of tag line is not a)
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To: b_sharp
They then go on to define complexity as an exclusive product of intelligence (unconvincingly I might add) so that genomic complexity must be the result of an intelligence. In effect what they have done is to perform 'research by definition' where their definition is both a premise and the conclusion.

Darwin did some of the same thing, although less in "origin of Species" and more in "The Descent of Man." There is something wrong with the very title, since he introduced natural selection as a Cause of something he had never observed, which is the change of one species into another, when what he really is talking about is variations in animal populations. It is this observable variation that makes plausible the notion of evolution, given that the fossil record shows an even more complex list of animal forms than our own observation.

284 posted on 04/19/2006 12:31:30 PM PDT by RobbyS ( CHIRHO)
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