Intelligent Design is Self-refuting

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Lion_IRC said:
The jargon woo is strong with this one. Evolution doesn’t deliberately/accidentally ‘filter’ anything.
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Yes it does. Natural selection is not a random process.
Mutations - random/spontaneous/unpredictable
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Correct.
Natural selection - luck
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No, very definitely not luck. I am afraid the explanation requires a little jargon and some numbers. This is science after all. The process is rather like compound interest. As an example, take a stable population of 1000 organisms; on average each organism has one descendant in the next generation. Now let a beneficial mutation appear with a 1% advantage, so the mutated organism will have on average 1.01 descendants in the next generation. For comparison I include ten other mutated organism with a 1% disadvantage. Start with a population of 10 deleterious, 989 neutral (or unmutated) and 1 beneficial mutations. See what happens if we let the population reproduce for one thousand generations:
Code: 
Generation  Deleterious   Neutral   Beneficial
----------  -----------   ------    ----------
     0         10.0       989.00          1.00
     1          9.9       989.00          1.01
    10          9.0       989.00          1.10
   100          3.7       989.00          2.70
   500          0.1       989.00        144.77
   700          0.0       989.00       1059.16
  1000          0.0       989.00      20959.16
That is why beneficial mutations are more common overall. They are rare initially, but they are amplified and spread by natural selection. You can also see that the deleterious mutations are eliminated and do not spread, despite being more common initially.

This is a very simple model and easy to set up on a spreadsheet, but it is enough to show the advantage natural selection gives a beneficial mutation and how it spreads through a population over the generations.
 
rossum said:
That is why beneficial mutations are more common overall. They are rare initially, but they are amplified and spread by natural selection. You can also see that the deleterious mutations are eliminated and do not spread, despite being more common initially.

This is a very simple model and easy to set up on a spreadsheet, but it is enough to show the advantage natural selection gives a beneficial mutation and how it spreads through a population over the generations.
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Human is same biological structure as thousands years ago. And non of species changed for thousands years. Did evolution stop?

God created all species at the most high level. There is no a process to perfection.
 
niceatheist said:
This is all part of Behe’s gibberish, which I contend he knows is gibberish.
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Mankind is fortunate that the Rosetta Stone was not discovered by an atheist evolutionist.

Atheist: I say, what is that strange looking rock over there?

Scientist: Strange. Those markings look designed. Could they be Egyptian hieroglyphs?

Atheist: Nonsense! It’s just gibberish. Those marks were probably caused by acidic bird scat, sand storms, you know, that sort of thing. No intelligence here.

Scientist: But …

Atheist: No buts, I saw it first. Finders keepers, you know. It’ll make a nice door stop for my library, don’t you think?
 
rossum said:
An egg is not intelligent. The various molecules of food used to feed the growing embryo are not intelligent. Yet at the end of the process, with no intelligent (name removed by moderator)uts, we get a dog, which has a level of intelligence.
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Perhaps someone has already handled this, but can you be serious?
It is (to a limited degree) intelligent creatures who intelligently copulate to intelligently introduce a new reality (embryonic stage of a dog which is same substance (dog) as it is (dog) the day it will die of old age).
The canine sperm and egg did not In the fallacy of emergence come together like a termite mound, but were intentionally united, not by themselves, but by the agents intelligently joined.
An equal level of intelligence to commend the agents’ intelligent intent for their dear puppy (and the other seven in the litter also).
It is correct that neither sperm nor egg is intelligent, but are generated by intelligence for an intelligent end (final cause). The soul of the embryo, fetus, puppy, dog, is one soul and always intelligent, always moving its material body to grow and manifest itself to us, so eventually we will say, “Good doggy.”

John Martin
 
mhmtas63 said:
Human is same biological structure as thousands years ago.
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No, our DNA is different now. Many humans have inherited resistance to the plague, smallpox and other diseases. Resistance to malaria and HIV is developing and spreading. The APO AI-Milano mutation is only found in a small population currently, but that is likely to spread as it confers resistance to heart disease when eating a fat-rich western diet.
And non of species changed for thousands years. Did evolution stop?
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Again incorrect. A new species of crayfish evolved during the 20th century: This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe.

Evolution is caused by imperfect replication in a situation of resource constraint. Both those conditions still apply so evolution continues.
 
John_Martin said:
which is same substance
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That is theology, not science. To quote Borges:
Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).

Borges – Funes the Memorious.
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Essences are part of Christian theology, not part of either Buddhist theology or of science. Since ID wants to be science, it also rejects such obviously theological ideas.
 
Bradskii said:
It doesn’t. But by any reasonable criteria, we are a very bad design indeed. So if God did design us, He did a very bad job. And not just on us.

However, if He allowed evolution to run its course with the intent that it ended up with us, faults being accepted as part of the process, then it all makes perfect sense.
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Catholics understand what happen after the fall. Death and decay.
 
buffalo said:
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Bradskii:
It doesn’t. But by any reasonable criteria, we are a very bad design indeed. So if God did design us, He did a very bad job. And not just on us.

However, if He allowed evolution to run its course with the intent that it ended up with us, faults being accepted as part of the process, then it all makes perfect sense.
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Catholics understand what happen after the fall. Death and decay.
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Gee, I thought the argument was that bad design is still design. Hence a designer. I’m sure I remember a fundamentalist saying that somewhere.
 
But that raises all sorts of questions. What sort of pelvis did Eve have? Did viruses kill before the Fall?

Tying Genesis to science to my mind creates a great many problems. Death and decay are key parts of a biosphere.
 
Bradskii said:
Gee, I thought the argument was that bad design is still design. Hence a designer. I’m sure I remember a fundamentalist saying that somewhere.
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Bad design is still design and from a scientific position does nothing to invalidate design detection.

From the philosophy point of view - a “good” design can undergo decay.

No conflict whatsoever.
 
niceatheist said:
But that raises all sorts of questions. What sort of pelvis did Eve have? Did viruses kill before the Fall?

Tying Genesis to science to my mind creates a great many problems. Death and decay are key parts of a biosphere.
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God said His creation was good. We see death and decay all around us. It was not so at the creation event or God would be a liar. Decay could not start until time began. Even so, it didn’t have to happen that way. It began after the fall.

There is no issue with this and is actually what we observe.
 
niceatheist said:
What sort of pelvis did Eve have? Did viruses kill before the Fall?
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Childbearing became more difficult and painful as a consequence of the fall.

Beneficial bacteria and viruses vastly outnumber the one’s we are now susceptible to. We have degenerated too. This is scientific fact.
 
The reason why child bearing is so risky in humans as compared to other primates is because the infant head is so large (to accommodate our much larger brain). The consequence of this is twofold; first it means human infants are born essentially more premature than other primates (this means humans spend more time in infancy requiring considerably more care and resources overall than other primates), and it means the female pelvis is pretty much as wide as it possibly can be and have human females still functionally bipedal. It’s the classic example of how evolution doesn’t optimize, but finds the half-way point. If a designer were starting out again, they’d either go back to the way marsupials give birth (with gestation part way completed), or go back to egg laying (like monotremes and reptiles). But evolution only works with the tools at hand, so bipedalism is highly selected for in hominids, so infants have to be born prematurely. It’s a compromise.

Bringing it back to pre-Fall, was Eve fully bipedal, and were shrunk after she partook of the fruit? Did Eve have a pouch or lay eggs?

This is one of the many problems with insisting upon a literal reading of Genesis. You have to imagine humans as an entirely different organism at a structural level pre-Fall, and thus assert evolution at speeds that science certainly could never agree with.

Would it not be better just to read Genesis as so many Christians have over the centuries; as a metaphorical account, rather than insisting upon literal interpretations that seem to come up with absurd answers.
 
Nope.

Read the paper:
We began this work hoping to better understanding the various claims regarding the de novo origin of certain nylonase genes. The idea that nylonases would have arisen very recently, de novo, was based upon the widely-held assumption that nylonases would have been essentially non-existent prior to the artificial manufacture of nylon. This basic assumption would not be justified if there were any nylonlike polymers in nature, or if nylonase activity required very low specificity, such that enzymes with other functions might also possess or acquire nylonase activity.

Our analyses indicate that nylonase genes are abundant, come in many diverse forms, are found in a great number of organisms, and these organisms are found within a great number of natural environments. We also show that nylonase activity is easily acquired through mutation of other enzymes, which strongly suggests that nylonase activity has very low specificity of the active site. These findings refute the widely held assumption that nylonases were essentially non-existent before 1935. In this light, there is no reason to believe that any nylonase emerged since 1935, and so there is no solid basis for invoking any de novo nylonase genes. Therefore, it seems only reasonable to reexamine the earlier claims of de novo genes.

 
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niceatheist said:
Bringing it back to pre-Fall, was Eve fully bipedal, and were shrunk after she partook of the fruit? Did Eve have a pouch or lay eggs?

This is one of the many problems with insisting upon a literal reading of Genesis. You have to imagine humans as an entirely different organism at a structural level pre-Fall, and thus assert evolution at speeds that science certainly could never agree with.

Would it not be better just to read Genesis as so many Christians have over the centuries; as a metaphorical account, rather than insisting upon literal interpretations that seem to come up with absurd answers.
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This post is baloney.

The account of the fall has been long held teaching of the Church.
 
So I take it you’re not actually going to deal with the physical issues involved in making human child birth relatively more risky than in other primates.
 
They invoked nylonase in other bacteria and mapped out the enzyme changes.
 
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