Evolution Critics Are Under Fire For Flaws in 'Intelligent Design'

Wall Street Journal ^ | Feb 13, 2004 | SHARON BEGLEY

[balrog666]

Idiot-geezers on parade placemarker.

[Dimensio]

In other words (pay attention now), all the evidence I need is in a verse somewhere in the Bible where it says each kind [species] produces offspring of its own kind (not something different). See?

No, I don't see how a line in the Bible is evidence for anything about biology, especially when the very verse you offered (and your interpretation along with it) clearly contradicts observed reality.

If you want to define what is "reality" (your particular interpretation of it, that is), have at it.

I can't define reality any more than you can. Reality is what it is, regardless of what you say, what I say or what your Bible says.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

The real issue is the stupidity that passes for an education in schools all across America.

You're not going to get an argument about this.

[qam1]

Gills on human fetuses

[mrfixit514]

It amazes me that people will accept the garbage that scientist have made up to explain the origins of life but they just can't bring themselves to believe the Bible. Evolution is a fairy tale. It takes just as much faith to believe in evolution as it does to believe that God created the world as described in Genesis.

[betty boop]

...or "devolves," as the case may be.…

Such devolution is the way of the world. It is only by direct intervention that such relational, spiritual, passionate, and intellectual entropy is overcome, by God. Yes bb, such is the way, of energy, isn't it? When there is a disconnection with its source, energy inexorably dissipates, just as knowledge is distorted and lost in our world's various religious "telephone games."

Dear Brother A – It is astonishing to notice how “the way of the world” seems to be so at odds with God these days – that is, with the soul’s and world’s own Source and sustenance. It seems we humans are suffering from a really bad case of spiritual entropy right about now.

Surely you are right about the corrective for such condition. Truly, it’s all in the energy – for essentially, God is Light.

And the thought occurs to me that Hell -- eternal damnation -- consists of total deprivation of Light, of consignment into utter darkness in total, irremedial isolation from all living Being forever. For all souls are immortal.

And another thought has struck me: We humans make our own Hells, such that we can live them already in this world. Cases in point: the twisted corruption of divine faith fostered by Islamicist terrorists; the recent shame, the infamia of the Roman Church; the sheer bad faith of the public discourse in our time, spreading confusion, anxiety, and a loss of confidence and will to confront reality in American society at large. Personal hells find a way of spreading to and embroiling others, in ways that hurt others.

Just thought of another case in point of the transposition of personal hells to the body politic: the travesty of court-imposed gay marriage, alive in my home state and elsewhere at the present time.

Talk about the propagation of personal hells into the body politic – not by the will of the people (many if not most of whom assuredly know better than to tamper with natural human relations that have evolved and stood up to the test of time over some forty-plus millennia), but by the constitutionally unwarranted, unaccountable fiat of a politicized, ideologically-driven judiciary, overriding the legislative authority, and thereby undermining the very foundations of our constitutional, democratic republic.

God is calling. Hopefully, Man will choose to take the call – for God’s sake, and thereby for his own.

[AndrewC]

So... how would your genes have been passed down BEFORE cloning?

Well, Mr. Sew Forking study Mendel and you might find out.

[VadeRetro]

Pieret:

If science were to adopt the "design hypothesis" as a methodology, what reason would there be to continue looking for the missing evolutionary path, since the answer already lies in an unknowable "designer"? To forgo the search for such answers, merely because of the failure of the imagination of a Dembski or a Behe, would be a tragedy.

"When you get to a mystery, stop! Publish! You're done."

I can't imagine ID ever teaching us a thing, and I get no good answers on how it is ever supposed to.

[PatrickHenry]

I can't imagine ID ever teaching us a thing, and I get no good answers on how it is ever supposed to.

The answer is in all those peer-reviewed ID science journals. You know, that great body of scientific literature that somehow doesn't exist. Talk about gaps!

[Ichneumon]

[Dembski:] But the TTSS, as Mike Gene (see citation at end) notes, is restricted "to animal and plant pathogens."

*Errrrnnt*.

For obvious reasons, the vast majority research on bacteria has been done on pathogenic bacteria -- those are the ones we have the largest motivation (and research grants) to try to learn about, so that we can find ways to devise protection against them.

Research has only scratch the surface of what sorts of components *non*pathogenic bacteria have. It's quite possible that many nonpathogenic bacteria have TTSS as well -- there's simply a lack of sufficient research to know.

And yet, I note that that doesn't prevent Dembski, or Gene (himself also a creationist) from drawing firm conclusions on the "fact" that "only" pathogenic bacteria have TTSS.

Accordingly, the TTSS could only have been around since the rise of metazoans.

This is even a more egregious error. First, the premise that leads them to this conclusion is demonstrated as shaky at best (see above). Second, and an even larger blooper, they have in no way ruled out the possibility that TTSS originally arose for some other more widespread use, but today has been retained primarily for use by enteropathogens.

This is a mistake that Behe and his followers make again and again and again -- presuming that today's use for a structure must necessarily be the use (and the only use) it has *always* filled.

[betty boop]

God has a design, which is flexible enough to include us and our shenanigans....

In faith, I believe this is an unimpeachably true statement, marron. God's plan must be flexible, because it definitely includes us human beings -- who He created in his image, with reason and free will.

Yet it seems to me we humans have just never gotten this "free will" business exacly right. (Adam blew it big time in the Garden.)

But I think your larger point is that there really does exist a community of being in the universe: perhaps something like God-Man-Society-World. In this hierarchy, God's law rules at each and every ontological level. But all the levels are required to express the total Being of the universe, and also the total being of any man, if he could but understand himself and his significance to the larger project of which he is a participant, to the reality beyond his own immediate inner world.

I agree this sort of thing requires whatever institutional support it can get. But such support should never be funded by the political state. (Not that you suggested such a thing.)

You wrote: "Some are as you say more willing vessels than others, and some are more readily moved to action than others."

God calls whom He wills; He calls them presumably for their fitness to take on the tasks that are needed, according to their unique abilities. And all of these called are equal in His sight. Or at least, that is the message of faith that comes through to me. A person of faith is a person of faith, though faith may express in different ways.

[balrog666]

When we come to thinking about the Big One we are certainly faced with a great list of big and serious questions - the kind of questions we in this Church are concerned to deal with - and today I have turned to the scriptures to pose the question 'If God has and is everything, so that God cannot desire anything, then why did He create the universe?'. If God was complete with respect to everything before the universe existed - and it doesn't make any sense to think of God as being anything but complete with respect to everything - how could there be a reason for Him to create All-That-Is? The answer given by the great thinkers is that God was doing the only thing that remains when you've got absolutely everything: God was engaging in play.

[Dimensio]

It amazes me that people will accept the garbage that scientist have made up to explain the origins of life but they just can't bring themselves to believe the Bible. Evolution is a fairy tale.

Why is evolution a fairy tale? What does evolution have to do with the origins of life?

[AndrewC]

Crybabies don't like the fact that I did not put a cite in my opinion. I will raise my opinion into a supported opinion. You will note that my citation does recognize the horizontal transfer aspect of the TTSS genetics, yet the assertion is still that the TTSS probably evolved from the flagellar system. Now apparently a recent study (2002) gives evidence that little can be stated with confidence about the genetic relationships between TTSS and the flagella. Nothing has been changed at the source of my citation since that publication.

Type III secretion systems.

Type Ill protein secretion systems (TTS systems), the subject of several recent reviews (Hueck, 1998; Galan and Collmer, 1999; Cheng and Schneewind, 2000; Staskawitz et al., 2000; Cornelius and Gijsegem, 2000; Plano et al., 2001) are found in many animal and plant pathogens and in at least one insect endosymbiont (Nguyen et al., 2000; Saltiel et al., 2001). With one exception, they are all proteobacteria, and that exception is Chlamydiaceae. Bacteria with TTS systems are usually host - cell associated at some time in their life histories, and the components of TTS systems are often virulence factors. In many of these systems, contact of the pathogen with host cells prompts delivery of bacterial proteins into the host-cell cytoplasm or cell membrane where they disrupt cellular functions to the benefit of the pathogen. Energy needed for delivery comes from ATP. Proteins of the secretion mechanism are conserved, but the secreted proteins tend to be unique to the bacterium secreting them. In proteobacteria, the TTS genes are clustered in the bacterial chromosome and have GC contents at variance with the rest of the genome, which suggests that they have been horizontally transferred. In the enterobacteria, the apparatus for secreting proteins by the TTS system is arranged in a supramolecular structure, the needle complex, which spans the inner and outer bacterial membranes, contains TTS proteins, and is thought to be the instrument of bacterial protein translocation into the host cell (Kubori et al., 1998. Blocker et al., 2001). Type Ill genes are homologous to those of the flagellar export apparatus from which they probably evolved.

[marron]

I like the way you think.

[DaGman]

"In fact, I find it even more awe-inspiring to consider that God built living things to be so adaptable to non-optimal conditions."

Very well put.

Some people don't give God the credit He deserves for creating evolution.

[kuma]

First things first. The fact that even one of those examples is in a textbook and regularly taught as indisputable fact is ridiculous.

Now the geological column is taught that it is layer upon layer one on top of the other in the exact order that they state when in nature you will not find it as such.

Vestigal organs. It's taught that the tailbone is an example of this but if you had it removed you couldn't walk. Sounds as though it serves a purpose to me.

Legs on whales. Those aren't legs they are used for mating.

[kuma]

They are folds not gills. This is just another classic example of, if it's in a textbook it must be true. It all ranks up there with fake phonics and whole language. They keep using those methods even though it renders so many people as functionally illiterate. To the "professionals" it's not about getting an education, it's about being right even if they are wrong.

[Dimensio]

Now the geological column is taught that it is layer upon layer one on top of the other in the exact order that they state when in nature you will not find it as such. I can't parse this at all.

Vestigal organs. It's taught that the tailbone is an example of this but if you had it removed you couldn't walk. Sounds as though it serves a purpose to me.

I'll leave the issue of the tailbone to someone who might know better and ask: what about the appendix?

Legs on whales. Those aren't legs they are used for mating.

So why are they so oddly similar to legs on land-mammals?

[kuma]

The appendix relates to the immune system and controls certain bacteria in the intestines. If you have it removed it won't kill you but it still has a function.

The back legs on whales were once thought to be legs but then through further study it was found that they are needed for mating. Their funtion was discovered so obviously we would want to stop teaching children that they are something when they are not.

I'm sorry I simply can't seem to figure out a way to explain the problem with the geological column but I know that my science teacher was knowledgeable enough to know that you will not find it layered as such. I once watched a TV show where a paleontologist pointed out the fact that he needed to unlearn everything he had learned about the columns in high school because it was not so in the real world.

For that matter some "science" teachers have taught that toilet bowls flush one way in the Northern Hemisphere and the other way in the Southern Hemisphere. That is found in textbooks and by the way it's incorrect.

Why do these people want incorrect information in textbooks?