Posted on 03/23/2006 10:06:14 PM PST by RDHarrison75
Probably a very good idea. I don't think this started there but I wasn't paying close attention.
And the Miller experiment goes on and on and on and on....
You give no evidence for your position, only that YOU have not been convinced. I give evidence for my position. Your argument is an instance of the argument from authority, which is known to be invalid and a dangerous habit of thinking to fall into--plus, as Chekov say in Star Trek, "You have no authority."
You must be judging my age from the picture on my Web site. I am 52 years old--you obviously are not.
Well said. Thanks for the word of support. As Phillip Johnson makes clear in his books, and you have reaffirmed there is a political battle (and, as is known to some, a spiritual war) that underlies the discussions of evolution versus intelligent design. We must stay aware that all three events are underway in a single discussion.
Thanks again for a note of sanity. May God bless.
you have no quals here
But I think I will follow PH's rule...
Here is your second logical fallacy: straw man. You have restated my arguments in a manner that has no connection to what I have said so that you can criticize a false target.
Here are some teatable implications of intelligent design theory (from the book):
Here are eight testable implications of intelligent design theory, all substantial and observable, confirmable and refutable—and the results are initially positive for each one.
(1) To the extent that future random mutagenesis studies in the laboratory extend through the entire genome of organisms and fail to demonstrate potential for evolutionary advancements as they have failed to do to date, both Dr. Meyer’s thesis that random mutations cannot generate the biological information required for the higher taxonomic categories, and Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis will be confirmed in the lab on the genetic level.
(2) Further investigation and description of specific organisms detailing their precise parts and functions, perhaps assisted by genetic-phenotypic component knockout studies, will also confirm or refute Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis at the level of observable molecular processes.
(3) Basic intelligent design theory says we should find biological machines and systems that give unequivocal indications of having been designed, that is, machines that warrant a design inference. We do find thousands of such machines in cellular systems and higher levels of biology and they bear an uncanny resemblance to our own mechanical constructions. Bacteria have outboard motors;[102] microscopic construction crews (DNA transcription), transport vehicles etc. The list goes on. Designs of this level of specified complexity justify the assumption of a designer everywhere else in our experience. Therefore, the design inference is as well justified in biology.
(4) The ultimate completion of the design of life forms as opposed to an endless evolutionary development is compatible with intelligent design theory, though not with Darwinian evolution. Should intelligent design completion occur, we could expect to see clear indications that random tinkering can progress the design no further. Professor Behe’s observations on irreducible complexity combined with observations of the nearly exceptionless destructive effect of random genetic mutations are as convincing evidence of design completion as we might hope to find. More subtle indications of design completion are seen in recent sequence reductions of bacterial clades, and variation spawning functions being culled out of higher taxons. We see an example of the latter in transposon systems becoming nonfunctional in eukaryotic genomes.[103] This could suggest the bacteria’s function for spawning more complex forms has been served and their genomes are being trimmed to the minimum required to support only their own existing functions. More directly put, the designer seems to be polishing the design and clearing scraps of clay from the sculpting table.
(5) If intelligent design of life forms were imposed upon the world by an intelligent designer, probability and time based analyses performed upon biological processes might well leave no doubt that chance was not the engine that drove life’s creation. Behe, Meyer and Dembski et al have established precisely that as the formulae above show.
(6) The fossil record we see is a prediction of intelligent design, for it is not a pattern that would be produced by an accidental process. The fossil record refutes classic Darwinian evolution. Although the fossil record is compatible with the new (unannounced) version of evolution, the new version fails to explain where the genetic machinery initially comes from that produces the amazingly frequent beneficial mutations that would have had to have occurred to produce viable changes almost every time an evolutionary modification occurred in order to generate the consistently progressive fossil record we see.
(7) Intelligent design theory predicts that we won’t find complex machines of any type lying around the earth having been formed by accidental processes, including strands of highly configured DNA—and we don’t find such things.
(8) Intelligent design theory predicts that either all attempts at producing complex life in the laboratory from random processes simulating the history of earth’s environment will fail or natural law(s) will be discovered that contains much more complex forms of information than the laws we know today, thus enabling the production of life from natural processes alone but leaving the information in those natural laws unexplained except for the hypothesis of a designer.
There is no question of the testability of intelligent design, even on the surface of things. It is truly baffling that the highly prestigious American Academy for the Advancement of Science should claim that intelligent design theory is not testable. It is also odd that many of their most notable scientists would claim that neo-Darwinian evolution has been tested over and over again. How can that be when we have just shown that one of their two primary claims, accidental processes, can never be tested, and the other, macroevolution of radically different types of creatures has never been seen, and the process is too big to be seen directly, making it practically nontestable.
Thanks for your 2 cents, it all adds up.
Concerning the ability of accident to produce life that you refer to, here are ther first three steps in the process and the complexity hurdles an accidental process faces. Who knows how many total steps should be separately delineated and analyzed. In Darwin's New Clothes I look at more than 20 with a total improbability of: One chance in 1.8 X (10 to the 610 power)X SP X CE X BC X IS X DR X CD X MR X SD X AF X GT X FR X FA X ME X DC X SB X EP X LEF X LA X HC X SI X T0). Each two letter symbol represents a separate improbability factor which is analyzed briefly in the book (mostly nontechnical).
Step 1: Life from Dust
According to Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at Discovery Institute in Seattle, the probability of getting even the most rudimentary protein by chance from nonliving sources is no more than 1 chance in 10125.[13] He cites peer reviewed scientific studies to support this number.
To construct a living cell, a hundred complex proteins are required at a minimum (most involve thousands). They must interact in intricate ways with several hundred other cell components, each cell performing over two million actions per minute. Therefore, the improbability of accidentally generating a living cell from nonliving chemicals is thousands of times more difficult than generating a single protein. I will conservatively estimate it at 1 chance in 10128.
The effort Dr. Meyer has made to exercise conservative rigor in his estimate can be seen in comparing his work to the other estimates that have been offered for the probability of accidentally accomplishing this first step of life which range from trillions of times smaller to 10-10(110).[14] Although my estimates are not rigorous as such, they are visibly underestimates based upon known information and logic. Therefore they conserve the rigor of Meyer’s basic values, from which they are derived.
Step 2: Proteins for 100,000,000 Highly Varied Species
Many new proteins will have to be generated and integrated into new systems or organs for each step up the evolutionary ladder. Dr. Meyer estimates that the odds of getting a single new viable standard sized protein from random genetic mutation of an existing organism are roughly 1077 against.[15]
A full inventory of all animal proteins has not been completed—or all animals for that matter. However, the human body is estimated to use, at a minimum, 85,000 different proteins.[16] We can then set the probability value for evolutionary protein generation conservatively at a clear minimum of 1 chance in 85,000 X 1077. The probability of Darwinian evolution so far assessed advances to 10-128 X 10-77 X 8.5 X 10-3, or 8.5 X 10-208.
The enormous complexity of creating a precisely folded structure of a hundred or more amino acids, each with may functionally relevant properties of their own is one thing. However, the full complexity of protein interactions in the cell, termed “systems proteomics” by Gabriel Waksman, is so complex that even our most state of the art computer simulations cannot represent it without shortcuts and simplifying assumptions. [17]
Step 3: Constructing Cellular Machines
Beyond the complexity of the DNA code itself is the actual day-to-day operation of the cell, which involves a myriad of complex machines. Professor Scott Minnich of the University of Idaho says the assembly instructions for cellular machines are even more complex than the protein coding instructions contained in DNA.[18]
The ribosome is one such machine, a critical organelle that manages the protein assembly process. To construct a ribosome, in addition to the basic protein composition of its shell, several copies of ribosomal RNA must be created and added to the structure. In Darwinian theory, the RNA coding sequence must first be achieved by accident. That accident must precisely configure 1500 base pairs of nucleotides, a conservative standard rRNA sequence size for a simple creature.[19]
Another biological machine is the cellulosome, a two-component machine composed of a dockerin sequence and a cohesion module, used by bacteria to degrade polysaccharides on the cell walls of plants. The dockerin sequence is composed of approximately 70 amino acid residues, while the cohesion module requires around 150 residues. The genetic information required to create a cellulosome is approximately 6,000,000 base pairs.[20]
A third biological machine that has gotten a lot of attention is the bacterial flagellum. Professor Michael Behe describes this intricate machine in Darwin’s Black Box. To get a detailed view of the complexity of the flagellum ion powered motor, see Robert M. Macnab’s Annual Review of Microbiology article entitled “How Bacteria Assemble Flagella.”[21] The bottom line is that these are fantastically complex machines with very closely matched parts. They are, in fact, outboard motors, having rotor, bushing, and bearings, very intricately powered and controlled by miniscule electronic impulses.
Because the rarity of functional proteins implies the corresponding rarity of the genes that code for them, the frequency of useful randomly configured genes can be estimated at about the same magnitude as useful randomly generated proteins: 1 in every 1077. A DNA sequence for a standard size gene is approximately 1,000 base pairs long. The probability of accidentally creating a ribosome, representing a sequence of 1500 base pairs, can then be estimated to be at least the improbability of one functional protein, or 10-77. Accidentally achieving the functional DNA of a cellulosome equates to making roughly 6,000 proteins, yielding an improbability of 6,000 X 10-77, or 6 X 10-80.
There are thousands of other biological machines that must be constructed accidentally under Darwinian theory. The complexity of these basic biological machines clearly signals the larger difficulty of the evolutionary task. Some simple organisms have thousands of ribosomes in one cell, and the full complexity of constructing a ribosome goes far beyond the estimate for the simple achievement of a sequence of rRNA presented here. Nor do we know absolutely everything regarding their construction. Substantial questions remain unanswered, and current research reveals the process of ribosome construction to be enormously complex.[22]
This is in reply to your mistaken claim that "In essense you are saying that the forces that drive evolution happen within an ID "tunnel" that directs its overall progress."
There is nothing in my book that hints at such a concept in the slightest, therefore I conclude that you intentionally misrepresent this as another instance of the straw man fallacy. You make up a vulnerable opponent because you cannot defeat the real one.
As anyone knows who has read the current debates, the ultimate source of the complex biological information in living organisms is unknwon to both sides of the debate.
Niether side is in possession of sufficient information to justify any hypothesis so specific as an ID tunnel, which I take to mean a continuing influence from the designer as opposed to simply designing the world and letting it go on its own from there (launch and leave). Science has insufficient evidence to be specific about the origin of biological information on either side of this debate.
Darwinists say genes evolve. That's it. They don't prove it, they don't demonstrate it. They just claim it.They don't show how complex configurations can be achieved by accident, they just claim that they are achieved. This is a very general hypothesis no more specific than the geneal thesis of intelligent design. It is also fully unevidenced at the two points of conntention: achieving significant complexity as opposed to trivial point mutations, and that accidental processes can make the changes at all.
Darwinists now make a lame defferal to natural law as the possible source of biological information. The more formal claims along these lines take the form of the structuralist arguments. But the structuralists can point to no laws that have information of sufficient complexity to generate biolgical machines nor can they provide a mathematical method to validly derive biological information from the information content of natural law. They know neither where the information is in natural law nor how to translate it from one form to another. Therefore structuralism is also a general and unevidence claim, no better than the core thesis of intelligent design. Structuralism may not be supremely popular but it has never been deined status as a scientific theory as has been done for intelligent design.
Intelligent design theorists make the general claim that there is a strong case that another source must be out there to explain the rise of biological information because accidental processes and natural law appear fully insufficient to get the job done. This is the same logic used to propose the existence of elemenatary particles at a point when we did not have the capability to empirically confirm their existence by independent means, by direct observation. The theories of those particles existence were not labled nonscientific for that reason.
Therefore I do not propose an ID tunnel because it is too specific a claim to be supported by the current evidence. No modern intelligent design theorist that I am aware of has claimed active intervention by God or a designer to guide the process of life's development(nor have they ruled it out). I am simply saying with the other ID theorists that there is no proper explanation of biological information other than intelligent design. It is that general and that simple, but that's not the evidential case for intelligent design, that is the conlcusion. The case for intelligent design is presented in several books, one of which is the e-book Darwin's New Clothes. That evidence cannot be reduced to straw men the size of a sound bit: you have to read the books.
The particulars of how intelligent design has generated biological information must await further investigation, just as the full biomechanical pathways of evolution (in whatever paths turn out to have truly occurred) must await decades more research. To be a scientific theory it is not necessary to provide the minutest of details at the point of the theories initial proposal. Those details only come after many decades of directed research.
Those are hopes in vain.
Science does not address the issue.
Philosophy has perhaps five or six major systems of knowing, one of which posits a Supreme or Absolute Being.
Direct encounter (revelation) is private not public and proves the issue only for the individual.
Have you, or any of the information theory school, ever run the numbers to see whether a single cell human embryo has more information -- in the strict mathematical sense of the word -- than an amoeba?
Thanks for the link to Medawar's review of Teilhard de Chardin!
Tom Bethel writes in the New Oxford Review, March 2006 (page 37)
But something else is at stake. Another agenda is lurking, barely concealed, and it is not science. It is the worldview of the Darwinians themselves. We need to put the spotlight on them. Believers and churchgoers are often accused of wishful thinking. But the shoe fits more neatly on the other foot. The wishful thinking, surely, belongs to the nonbelievers. I suspect that some of them are more discomforted by the thought that there may really be a Designer in the Sky (who may call them to account for their actions).
So, yes, wishful thinking may be an important issue here.
I cannot prove it, because the evolutionists never admit it. I deduce it from the ferocity of their response, and from their plainly disingenuous claim to be concerned about the purity of science. It is clear from many other considerations that the purity of science has been the last thing on their minds. What they wish to preserve is their cultural monopoly, and their sense that God is (at best) no more than an optional extra, leaving them free to ignore the moral law whenever they are so inclined.
The point was well put by the satirist Jonathan Swift, just over 300 years ago. He recalled the man who listened with growing delight to the arguments of an atheistic freethinker. The listener "immediately took the hint," Swift wrote, and "most logically concluded: Why, sir, if it be as you say, I may drink on and defy the parson."
Well, it wasn't long before the philosophes of the French "enlightenment" undertook a systematic campaign, urging us all to defy the parson. Charles Darwin was very much in that tradition..He despised Christianity (as few seem to know). He wrote, in a passage in his autobiography that was censored by his own children and not made public until 1958: "Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished - and this is a damnable doctrine."
Someone who's written 80,000 words to attack a strawman version of evolution hardly has room to complain on that score.
If you're going to use bigotry to defend your point, then you might as well come right out and say it instead of hiding behind Tom Bethel.
Explain where you see bigotry in the sentence cited.
The contention that scientists and people with a materialist viewpoint uphold the ToE in order to subvert moral law.
Curious; what do you suppose to be the source of moral law?
I realize that last question was unfair, so please ignore it. Mr. Bethel better knows this topic than me, and look again at his remark:
"I cannot prove it, because the evolutionists never admit it. I deduce it from the ferocity of their response, and from their plainly disingenuous claim to be concerned about the purity of science. It is clear from many other considerations that the purity of science has been the last thing on their minds."
You may be an athiest of high morality, or at least a decent fellow. I have no problem with your athieism. There are decent athiests. But why this vehement crusade to save humanity from belief in things spiritual? I have no desire to embrace the spiritual death of athieism.
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