Time to Give It Up [Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity]

Seed Magazine ^ | 4/10/06 | Britt Peterson

[ConsentofGoverned]

One question that has bothered my small intellect is:
the Poppy flower bud produces opium, but opium as far as I know has no function for the poppy, other than man wants it for it's narcotic effect as is mimics endorphins at a mu receptor site. Did the poppy evolve to produce opium for man or did it just produce opium for no apparent evolutionary advantage, and how does this fit in with the whole evolution selects life best suited for survival-why waste valuable energy producing opium when it has no benefit for the plant??

[VadeRetro]

Don't forget, those mutations had to occur within, lets say, the first billion years or so..you can't use the whole 4.5 billion years...

Are you sure? What do we need at 3.5 billion years ago for a genome? Source?

(i.e. the one that doesn't get corrected by correction enzymes....oh, by the way, where did THEY come from?)

Looks like an advantageous mutation to me. What were you going to suggest and what's the evidence for your idea?

DE-EVOLUTION

Change is change, although if you start as simple as you can get there's simply more room to experiment in the direction of increasing complexity.

P.S. what was the food source of the original bacteria...

If you've actually been following this stuff (BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!)...

Well, if you don't know what science even says on the subject, how do you know it's wrong?

But I digress. You have something called RNA World, a bigger-than-cellular system-as-organism. The first cellular animals form as parasites off of RNA-World. As RNA-World gets eaten up, two things are happening. Photosynthetic plants are evolving from animals, and animals are learning to eat plants and animals. You can Google, right?

Anyway, my comment to eddie2 would seem to apply to you. You don't rebut science by being dumb as a stump about what science is even saying.

If you don't know what it says, how do you know it's wrong?

[ConservativeAgenda]

ping

[VadeRetro]

Did the poppy evolve to produce opium for man or did it just produce opium for no apparent evolutionary advantage...

The only evidence that it has no advantgage for the poppy is that you don't know of one, right?

[BagelFace]

Well, just show me macro-evolution in a lab and I'll sign right up...what's that? You can't? Oh... *Note: feel free to attack me Darwin-bots, but I'm not buying (and the usual disclaimer: I am not pro-creationism.)

Calling attention to oneself with mindless drivel... is definitely NOT the Darwinian way to happiness and success. Instead, might I suggest throwing a dinner party for your friends? There is a lovely recipe for pastry puffs in the "downhome cooking" thread.

[shuckmaster]

Such studies solidly refute all parts of the intelligent design argument,... Consequently, whatever debate remains must be characterized as purely political.

Good article but they're not going to give it up anytime soon. There's quite a few anti-science descendants of monkeys around here who are irreducibly ignorant and quite proud of it!

[somniferum]

Im not an expert (despite the name ;) but I would imagine that opiates are alkaloids which act as a natural insecticide of sorts, much like nicotine does for tobacco.

Someone correct me if I am wrong.

[ConsentofGoverned]

come come my coyoteman, your namesake would never be caught in such a trap..as you know the extrapolation of skull morphology is subjective at it's root. with out vital DNA your use of jigsaw puzzle pieces resulted in fakes more times than not. Piltown man strike a bell..many of the skulls in the series were not even found on the same continent. may be of children or mutations of same species or adults vs children..too much we do not know about this attempt to use fossil records inappropriately.

[Theo]

I suppose someone could have put that diagram together "in a lab"....

I frankly stopped reading the article at "cronies." No agenda there....

[ConsentofGoverned]

love the name..but As another posted here just because you do not know one..well thats why I posted the question-and as a natural insecicide no that does not hold up- most plants produce toxins that paralize some insects ..ragweed for one, which we use for killing of human pests such as
lice.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"well thats why I posted the question-and as a natural insecicide no that does not hold up- "

What's your explanation? That God made opium so that people could get high?

[manwiththehands]

I write software for a living. My code runs instrumentation that "observes" and "measures". I get it. But my clients would know if I were "fudging" my results because my results can be "measured" and "observed" i.e. validated through numerous other methods.

Validation of computer modeling simply cannot be done unless the models move from the computer into the "real world" so that the models can be validated. That simply has never happened in the use of modeling to study evolutionary processes.

[ConsentofGoverned]

"What's your explanation? That God made opium so that people could get high?"
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>..............
pretty mundane response, no I was thinking of the pain it and it's congeners relieves in millions of badly injured and the terminal patients i deal with daily, I hope you will never need it's kindness, but chances are you will.

[furball4paws]

Fastest doubling time on record is 8 minutes, Bacillus stearothermophilus. "Typical" bacteria are usually around 1 hour doubling time. Fast eucaryotes double typically once a day.

[Coyoteman]

I didn't think one was needed, but I guess on these threads.. sheesh ;)

If you were posting in jest, my apologies.

On some threads its hard to tell.

[manwiththehands]

So where did these self-programming programs come from? Outer space?

[furball4paws]

You can have him VR. It'd take me a year to straighten out this mess.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"pretty mundane response, no I was thinking of the pain it and it's congeners relieves in millions of badly injured and the terminal patients i deal with daily, I hope you will never need it's kindness, but chances are you will."

Not mundane, as you did not specify what you thought it's alleged purpose would be.

Your answer still assumes, a priori, without any evidence, that everything we see in the natural world is there for US. It's a very arrogant position.

[DennisR]

Well, after reading that story, I am totally convinced we and the rest of the universe are here by chance.

[Blzbba]

"...and must be the work of a creator, since the absence of any single part makes the whole system void."


That's one extremely large assumption. How, exactly, does the absence of a single part voiding the system prove the existence of a creator?