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LittleSoldier
Guest
Backpack searches, definitely. That will do for now. They will be conducted by the same men who stand at the entrances of Catholic churches to make sure that people who want to go to Mass believe in evolution.
Pope's astronomer dismisses ID and says Church was "spectacularly wrong" in its treatment of Galileo
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lao_tzu
Guest
Hello buffalo,Curious how anyone who studies the evidence and makes a clear case against evolution is always disparaged.
With nothing else to go on, I have to assume you’re including Dr. Young among those who’ve studied the evidence and made a clear case against evolution. Yet the only evidence you’ve presented of this is the equivalent of a short blog post in which he rejects the very definition of biological evolution while citing another writer’s incoherent ramblings about information.
If you really want to know what information is, google Shannon. He’s the guy who created the field of information theory, and the definition. Similarly, if you’d like to know about the evidence for evolution, you need to talk to biologists, or read their papers.
More finches, lol. Different species. Evolution occurs at something of a glacial pace, and if you’re looking for larger differentiations, you need to look across larger time spans. You can’t get from the root of an oak tree to its leaves without crossing its trunk and branches, and that takes time. But we can still look at the roots, and the trunk, and the branches, right there in front of us. They’re there for species and genera and families in the geological record, and within the DNA of today’s species as well.
Well, no. What you’re talking about processes that work to prevent mutations in replication within an existing organism. They don’t have much to do with the mutations that occur during sexual reproduction. At one point during the process that led to each of us, a half-selection of each our parents’ DNA was chosen, along with a scattering of mutations including base insertions and deletions, migrations of sections of the DNA, and even occasional chromosomal duplications and fusions. There’s a famous fusion on our second chromosome that links near perfect copies of chimpanzee chromosomes 12 and 13, since renamed 2a and 2b.
Moreover, these corrective mechanisms — and other molecular processes that are discovered — don’t make evolutionary explanations “tougher.” Evolution remains just as difficult as it was before. This information merely gives us a better measure of how evolution occurred. It’s well understood that not every conceivable mutation can occur rapidly. We don’t expect next season’s giraffes to be spouting wings. But we do expect that within six million years, half a million generations, humans and chimps could evolve from a common ancestor. Plug in the numbers from base substitutions, and there you are.
Yeah, that’s a fine link if you’re interested in popular science explanations. It’s not really a good substitute for the professional journals if you want to get down into the nitty gritty. I do wonder why you cite it, though, as earlier you were arguing for the inability of evolution to create changes. Understand, the difference between adaptation to separate environments and speciation is merely one of scale. There’s no known mechanism that forms a firm boundary to continued diversification, and so it proceeds.
Allow me to remind you that this conversation began with a suggestion from you that there is no empirical evidence for evolution, and so evolution, like ID, can rightly be segregated from the science classroom. Posting empirical evidence for evolution is a trivial effort. The same cannot be said for ID. Shall we return to the subject of this thread?
As ever, Jesse
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edwest2
Guest
Nice attempt to dodge. An obviously manufactured object, in my example, would contain many parts, likely metallic, and visible examples showing how the parts interact upon disassembly. You are simply refusing to use your imagination. Just a reminder, scientists are spending time and money looking for intelligent signals from space on the assumption that other civilizations at least as advanced as our own, and likely more so, are out there, even though they lack the mechanical object on Mars for evidence that anyone is out there.
God bless,
Ed
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buffalo
Guest
A better or more accurate definition and classification of species.
Sure it can - it is now based on morphological and reproductive isolation. Scientists admit the problems.
Before genetics it was the best we could do.
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buffalo
Guest
The ID deniers should petition for immediate defunding of SETI.
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buffalo
Guest
We can but just not yet. One more post.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=560
The 95% chimp human similarity is bunk and now is put at around 70% as the genome mapping is being studied.
“Evolution moves at a glacial pace.” - (yeah, that is the claim) but we see the finch adaptations in just a few years. Explanation?
I never argued that adaptations do not occur. I argue the mechanism.
a better measure?We can move the Shannon information stuff to the “back fence forum”.
Let me remind you that empirical science is observable, repeatable and predictable.
Since evolution is a one time event and cannot be predicted then it falls under philosophy.
Now let us take ID. Let us just say that we can look at an object or living organism. Now we can run a formula on these items. Each time we get the same amount of CSI. We know can repeat and predict which is far better science than evolution is.
Let us assign values for right angles, 45 degree angles, movement, purpose, function etc…of anything we observe. Do the same for a rock. Compare the values. The computer you are working on right now has orders of magnitude of CSI than the rock in your back yard. What are the odds of the rock being designed?
Is this empirical science or philosophy?
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lao_tzu
Guest
As you wish, buffalo,We can but just not yet. One more post.
[image of lineages removed]
Yes, necessarily the fusion occurred in our line, not that of the chimpanzees. We’re the ones with the fused chromosome, not them. But the chimp chromosomes 2a and 2b still line up right next to each other in our chromosome 2, and require some kind of explanation. They’ve been visibly identical well before genome sequencing was available, using nothing more than staining techniques. This, by the way, was a prediction of evolutionary theory. Given a common ancestor, we expect that it would have had 48 chromosomes because all of the other primates close to us had 48 chromosomes, and so we should have a fusion region. When we looked for it, we found it.
There is no such prediction from creationism. The similarities and fusion region from that perspective are nothing more than divine whimsy. Or, perhaps, a deliberate act of subterfuge, created in order to mislead us about our ancestry.
That’s really bizarre. It’s not the case, either, but it’s so far wrong that the first thing that strikes me is how bizarre it is. Even Answers in Genesis acknowledges a 95 percent similarity. You have to count the indels to get that low, however. So long as you’re just looking at protein-encoding DNA, it’s still 98.6.
That particular adaptation is nothing more than controlling the order of offspring by sex. While the results are quite visible, the actual change is very minor. The first eggs yield larger offspring. Large scale evolution, such as the transition from scales to feathers, has been seen to have occurred over the course of tens of millions of years. Calling that speed glacial is nearly hyperbolic.
Yes, a better measure. The more we know about biological and molecular processes, the better we can measure evolution. Seriously, they’ve got formulas and everything. Laughter may make the heart lighter, but it doesn’t change basic reasoning. The closer we look, the more detailed the image we observe, the better we understand.
Actually, that’s not the case, either. I wonder if you haven’t perhaps confused your origins paradigms. Creationism is the one that represents a one time event. Evolution is not. It has not stopped. It’s been an active process for billions of years, encompassing millions of speciation events, and is still continuing. It is observable to all palaeontologists. It makes predictions that have been checked and found to confirm the theory, such as the existence of a fusion region in one of our chromosomes. Other than religious objections, it is entirely uncontroversial.
The science that allows us to infer common ancestry is the exact same science used to demonstrate paternity in court. Case closed, so to speak.
This is an example of something I noted earlier in this thread. While ID would like to be able to perform such calculations, as it would like to be able to present explanations, it doesn’t. These formulas you’d like to think could possibly some day be performed cannot be performed today. This is Dembski’s thing, and while he’s been promising a theoretical framework to do so for many years, he still hasn’t delivered. As the entire “information” argument he presents is incoherent, this isn’t surprising.
Allow me to point out that by the tenets of creationism, that rock is just as surely designed as my computer. This is Paley’s nemesis. While we need only assume that humans created the watch, he has to assume that his god made the beach.
One of the things we use to infer deliberate design is a knowledge of the design criteria being used along with evidence of an actual, living designer. We don’t have that for anything other than living organisms, and especially, we don’t have that for gods. If we were to use design criteria that we ourselves consider plausible, we’d never end up with a human. Our eyes are wired backwards, for one thing. We’ve got nerves that do a meters-long loop that’s easily explained if we assume that evolution was constrained by the location of pre-existing structures, a constraint that can’t reasonably be imputed onto a god mixing it all up from scratch.
As ever, Jesse
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wanstronian
Guest
It is not I that is calling the pope silly (although I hold an opinion, to which I am entitled), but those ID proponents who continue to insist he is wrong to reject ID. This should have been obvious from the context. My post mocked IDers, so by definition didn’t mock the Catholic religion.
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wanstronian
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Do not presume to understand the motivation for my question. It was asked genuinely. I was curious as to how you would identify something as designed.
You’ve given a few examples of properties of a designed object (one of which clearly doesn’t apply to biological life) - but what’s the process that you follow to determine whether an object is designed? Is it a checklist, a subset of a documented set of properties…what?
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wanstronian
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On what grounds?
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rossum
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That is just my point. ID scientists are not actually measuring any CSI. Where are the ID papers giving us the calculations of the CSI in various versions of bacterial, arche or eukaryote flagella? Where are the calculations of the CSI differences between equivalent chunks of human and chimpanzee genomes? Where is ID’s on-line CSI calculator that will take in a piece of DNA and give an estimate of the CSI in that DNA segmant?
Of cource DNA and its code should be studied. My point is that all the studying is being done by mainstream biologists. Where are the ID science papers giving the results of the ID sciencists’ study? All the ID journals that I an aware of have a distinct dearth of papers. For example, PCID has not been published since 2005. Has there been no ID research done since 2005? Since then the “Journal of Evolutionary Informatics” has come and gone in a cloud of zero research leaving just a dead web address: joei.org/index.php/joei.
Go back to my example of an aluminium cylinder block in a palaeolithic deposit. Palaeolithic man did not have the technology to smelt aluminium. Nor could he cast or machine such an object. Knowledge of the capabilities of any proposed designer are perfectly valid (name removed by moderator)ut to any inference about design. If the suspect has a valid alibi then the forensic scientist knows that since humans cannot emit invisible death rays from their brains that kill at a distance then that suspect was not directly responsible for the murder. An unknown designer with unknown powers may or may not have been capable of doing what ID proposes. If your proposed designer does not have the power to manipulate DNA then any biological design inference must be incorrect. Where are ID’s lab experiments showing the designer(s) manipulating DNA? Where is your evidence? Biologists have evidence of evolution changing DNA so for the moment standard evolutionary biology is ahead.
I have said before that ID is not yet science. It might yet become science, but it has a great deal of scientific work to do first. In 2002 Dr Dembski said: “Because of ID’s outstanding success at gaining a cultural hearing, the scientific research part of ID is now lagging behind.” (Keynote address, RAPID Conference). Scientific research has continued to lag badly behind. Up to now ID has been more of a political or theological entity than a scientific one. Unless and until that changes ID will not be science.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
rossum
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Leela
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Not so curious to me since the same is true about anyone who studies the evidence and comes to the conclusion that the earth is flat.
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lao_tzu
Guest
Hello Ed,
I’m sorry. I’m sure you have specific instances in mind, but your reference is unusable. You’re going to have to provide links to actual posts, I’m afraid. Beyond that, this is a religious discussion board, not the place one should go to examine the justifications for scientific theories. There are textbooks for that sort of thing.
Allow me to reiterate and expand on a point I made with buffalo earlier. Information has a definite meaning in the field of information theory. This definition is fundamental to a trillion dollar industry, and can’t simply be changed to suit the aspirations of the Discovery Institute and its supporters. The DI definition, or as much of one as can be inferred from Dembski, is incoherent. Anyone even slightly familiar with Shannon knows this.
By any reasonable usage, the “information carrying capacity” (we’d say “channel capacity”) of a human is orders of magnitude less than that of many microbes. If you’ve been misinformed about this, I suspect it’s due to the sources of your information about information.
As ever, Jesse
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edwest2
Guest
On the contrary, I specialize in the history of science and technology. I think it’s relevant to point out the inappropriate mixture of philosophical and ideological concepts into biology texts. But this represents the unified front against any idea that includes the word beginning with G. The science classroom must be indoctrinated against any theistic ideas creeping in so some writers include their personal bias. Quite wrong.
God bless,
Ed
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buffalo
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The CSI formula has to be solved. For example what value do we assign certain attributes?That is just my point. ID scientists are not actually measuring any CSI. Where are the ID papers giving us the calculations of the CSI in various versions of bacterial, arche or eukaryote flagella? Where are the calculations of the CSI differences between equivalent chunks of human and chimpanzee genomes? Where is ID’s on-line CSI calculator that will take in a piece of DNA and give an estimate of the CSI in that DNA segmant?
Of cource DNA and its code should be studied. My point is that all the studying is being done by mainstream biologists. Where are the ID science papers giving the results of the ID sciencists’ study? All the ID journals that I an aware of have a distinct dearth of papers. For example, PCID has not been published since 2005. Has there been no ID research done since 2005? Since then the “Journal of Evolutionary Informatics” has come and gone in a cloud of zero research leaving just a dead web address: joei.org/index.php/joei.
Go back to my example of an aluminium cylinder block in a palaeolithic deposit. Palaeolithic man did not have the technology to smelt aluminium. Nor could he cast or machine such an object. Knowledge of the capabilities of any proposed designer are perfectly valid (name removed by moderator)ut to any inference about design. If the suspect has a valid alibi then the forensic scientist knows that since humans cannot emit invisible death rays from their brains that kill at a distance then that suspect was not directly responsible for the murder. An unknown designer with unknown powers may or may not have been capable of doing what ID proposes. If your proposed designer does not have the power to manipulate DNA then any biological design inference must be incorrect. Where are ID’s lab experiments showing the designer(s) manipulating DNA? Where is your evidence? Biologists have evidence of evolution changing DNA so for the moment standard evolutionary biology is ahead.
I have said before that ID is not yet science. It might yet become science, but it has a great deal of scientific work to do first. In 2002 Dr Dembski said: “Because of ID’s outstanding success at gaining a cultural hearing, the scientific research part of ID is now lagging behind.” (Keynote address, RAPID Conference). Scientific research has continued to lag badly behind. Up to now ID has been more of a political or theological entity than a scientific one. Unless and until that changes ID will not be science.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
rossum
Here are some answers - (Rome wasn’t built in a day)
Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information
Which scientists are studying CSI in DNA? That is exactly the problem. They are ignoring it because of the implications. I doubt mainstream scientists will risk their careers. This research will be done on the outside until it gains traction. It also takes funding. This paradigm shift will also need to take place in the grantors. You can see just how difficult it is to buck an entrenched belief. Give it time. But it should succeed or failure on its own merits, don’t you agree?
I do not posit that the designer actively manipulates DNA. (although He could if He wished). IDvolution as you have read by now posits that God “breathed” the language of DNA in the beginning. (think of terraforming ala Star Trek) We see that all living organisms share the same core genes, 500 or so. The language of DNA is the main driver of adaptations. In other words life is front loaded with the information to necessary to adapt.
ID the science needs empirical success. If it cannot it will be relegated to the philosophy class right along with evolution. I believe though ultimately ID will be science when it is able to created the formula that is observable, repeatable and predictable. Given the last few decades of science discovery I believe it will be successful. Now that will be ID the science. Who the designer is is philosophical still.
I am not sure we presently have the computer power to do a complete CSI analysis between a chimp and human. We can see that the original method that arrived at 95% is flawed. This is a complex issue. Ultimately we may never be able to get our arms completely around the DNA language if it is from God as IDvolution posits, for the same reason He doesn’t lay down on a lab table to be analyzed.
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buffalo
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We do not have algorithms to detect design so it is a waste of taxpayer money.
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LittleSoldier
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What is the definition that is used now? What are the problems with it?
I’ve been out of college a long time. Maybe the definition has changed. When I was in college the biggest problem was with certain organisms that didn’t fit neatly into any existing Kingdom.
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buffalo
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Common design.As you wish, buffalo,
Yes, necessarily the fusion occurred in our line, not that of the chimpanzees. We’re the ones with the fused chromosome, not them. But the chimp chromosomes 2a and 2b still line up right next to each other in our chromosome 2, and require some kind of explanation. They’ve been visibly identical well before genome sequencing was available, using nothing more than staining techniques. This, by the way, was a prediction of evolutionary theory. Given a common ancestor, we expect that it would have had 48 chromosomes because all of the other primates close to us had 48 chromosomes, and so we should have a fusion region. When we looked for it, we found it.
There is no such prediction from creationism. The similarities and fusion region from that perspective are nothing more than divine whimsy. Or, perhaps, a deliberate act of subterfuge, created in order to mislead us about our ancestry.
That’s really bizarre. It’s not the case, either, but it’s so far wrong that the first thing that strikes me is how bizarre it is. Even Answers in Genesis acknowledges a 95 percent similarity. You have to count the indels to get that low, however. So long as you’re just looking at protein-encoding DNA, it’s still 98.6.
That particular adaptation is nothing more than controlling the order of offspring by sex. While the results are quite visible, the actual change is very minor. The first eggs yield larger offspring. Large scale evolution, such as the transition from scales to feathers, has been seen to have occurred over the course of tens of millions of years. Calling that speed glacial is nearly hyperbolic.
Yes, a better measure. The more we know about biological and molecular processes, the better we can measure evolution. Seriously, they’ve got formulas and everything. Laughter may make the heart lighter, but it doesn’t change basic reasoning. The closer we look, the more detailed the image we observe, the better we understand.
Actually, that’s not the case, either. I wonder if you haven’t perhaps confused your origins paradigms. Creationism is the one that represents a one time event. Evolution is not. It has not stopped. It’s been an active process for billions of years, encompassing millions of speciation events, and is still continuing. It is observable to all palaeontologists. It makes predictions that have been checked and found to confirm the theory, such as the existence of a fusion region in one of our chromosomes. Other than religious objections, it is entirely uncontroversial.
The science that allows us to infer common ancestry is the exact same science used to demonstrate paternity in court. Case closed, so to speak.
This is an example of something I noted earlier in this thread. While ID would like to be able to perform such calculations, as it would like to be able to present explanations, it doesn’t. These formulas you’d like to think could possibly some day be performed cannot be performed today. This is Dembski’s thing, and while he’s been promising a theoretical framework to do so for many years, he still hasn’t delivered. As the entire “information” argument he presents is incoherent, this isn’t surprising.
Allow me to point out that by the tenets of creationism, that rock is just as surely designed as my computer. This is Paley’s nemesis. While we need only assume that humans created the watch, he has to assume that his god made the beach.
One of the things we use to infer deliberate design is a knowledge of the design criteria being used along with evidence of an actual, living designer. We don’t have that for anything other than living organisms, and especially, we don’t have that for gods. If we were to use design criteria that we ourselves consider plausible, we’d never end up with a human. Our eyes are wired backwards, for one thing. We’ve got nerves that do a meters-long loop that’s easily explained if we assume that evolution was constrained by the location of pre-existing structures, a constraint that can’t reasonably be imputed onto a god mixing it all up from scratch.
As ever, Jesse
Not bizaar at all. When alignments are attempted to be matched vast differences are found. So we find areas of similarity or even the same in different alignments again suggests common design or commonly used components. (why recreate the wheel)
Sure, God is the author of all creation. That may be the ultimate difficulty since we are living in the frame of design. Perhaps we may not be able to formulize God’s design but we can see evidence. The basis of science is that the universe is intelligible.
Design does not preclude bad design, but how can we really know since we are not the designer.
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buffalo
Guest
Here are some of the issues:
Code:
**[The Sound of Taxonomy Exploding](http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-sound-of-taxonomy-exploding/)**
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lao_tzu
Guest
Hello again, buffalo,
What I found bizarre was your citation of only 70 percent similarity. Not even the most hardline creationist organization comes close to that degree of dissimilarity. When I have only your statement to the effect on one hand, and actual, physical measurements on the other, complete with methodologies and analysis, directly contradicting your statement, I can only assume you have been badly misinformed.
Common design is unsatisfying as an explanation as it does not predict these similarities. We have no experience with measuring such design work, nor examples to examine, nor clues on how such design might be implemented. On the other hand, we have abundant evidence of genomes being transmitted across the generations through natural reproductive processes, which is sufficient in itself to explain the similarities we observe. What’s missing is any reason to add a divine submolecular genomic meddler. We know this transmission of similarity occurs naturally. We do not know these natural causes to be insufficient.
And there you have it, an insuperable difficulty in inferring design. Without a basis, some standard by which we can say, “This is what was intended,” no intention can be read from any observation. When “bad” design is interpreted as “intelligent” design, the very idea of design becomes incoherent. More, the suggestion that “bad” design of humans, in the presuppositional framework of humans constructed in the image of the creator itself, strikes me as theologically heterodox for an adherent of any Abrahamic religion.
This is the kind of quagmire that forces me to reject any of these gods, choosing instead a purely natural explanation that bypasses any need to engage in such mental gymnastics. Better an incomplete explanation that makes sense and is open to correction and expansion than a more complete yet fixed explanation which cannot be made to make sense, in my view.
As ever, Jesse
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