Darwin's Influence

[Mordecai]

Are you telling me I shouldn't believe the Discovery Institute website now?

...if you are, I'll take that as progress...

I got my info. largely from Wiki, in fact. Apparently, the ideas for ID came from the 70's and 80's. However, it hasn't been a movement and hasn't had any real voice until Dembski and Behe. Had you heard of it prior to them? I hadn't. Point is, the discussion was about how much time they've had to make headway convincing scientists. In the 70's and 80's, they didn't have Dembski's and Behe's specified complexity and irreducible complexity. Since the early nineties, there has been quite a bit of headway. Look at Antony Flew and how he became convinced. It's gotta be pretty convincing stuff to convince Antony Flew (and the Darwinists have been claiming he's just old and senile. ha ha).

Yes - they have had ample time to gain a scientific consensus. And yet after 30 years they still haven't managed to gain a consensus that it is even a valid scientific theory!

...heh - let me guess - a vast atheistic conspiracy in a mainly theistic world-wide scientific community?!

I don't care if it's a theory or a hypothesis or what the consensus is. I've read the spin and distortions by DArwininsts, which marks them as afraid of ID and willing to lie to protect their jobs and status or dogma... not sure of their motivation. Berlinski says he sees no need for conspiracy in order for scientists to spin things, blacklist their opponents, lie and distort, as Darwinism sustains them in their field of study. It's a little like the priests of Noah, being sustained by their corrupt doctrines which gave them power. No conspiracy. Just insecurity and cowardice. They continually rely on the ruling of a judge who used 90% of the ACLU's exact words in his decision piece. Why play politics, if you actually have the science on your side?

Darwinism as an explanation for the origin of species is not a scientific theory either. To be a theory, there are extremely high standards set. If you think Darwinism as an explanation for the origin of species is a theory, CFR, please. What I hear is that evolution is accepted as a theory. No argument. Darwinian processes are real. I agree. Did Darwinian processes produce the diversity of species? See Michael Denton's A Theory in Crisis.

That it hasn't had broad scientific acceptance doesn't surprise me, as so much propaganda has been put out there against it, not to mention the suppression. Why are they so afraid of people hearing this stuff? I don't understand. If the science is on their side, why suppress the opposing point of view? Pretty much everything I read from newspapers and science magazines has been lies. I know what ID is and what their arguments are, so I know when a strawman is being presented.

Well, if you go through the threads on Mormon Apologetics and look at the content, every claim that ID isn't science has been met with what I consider to be valid responses. If you think those responses are invalid, explain why. I will respond. Also, feel free to show me all the evidence that Darwinism produced the diversity of species. I keep CFRing for that, but I've come to the conclusion that the evidence just isn't there. As Denton pointed out, all the evidence suggests discontinuity in evolution and not gradualism. Where's the Darwinism?

[thesometimesaint]

It meets the definition.

http://www.wilstar.com/theories.htm

[Mordecai]

It meets the definition.

http://www.wilstar.com/theories.htm

What is the theory of evolution other than common descent and change over time? ID doesn't have a problem with those at all. One can accept the theory of evolution and still accept ID. (I don't personally think common descent is a remotely proven fact. I think the evidence is pretty good, though).

[thesometimesaint]

Mordecai:

You can believe in little green men from Mars did it. However science has other ideas.

Evolution posits no force outside of what is in the observable universe. ID is religion posing as science. It posits some unknowable, and unobservable force directing Evolution.

[Mordecai]

Mordecai:

You can believe in little green men from Mars did it. However science has other ideas.

Evolution posits no force outside of what is in the observable universe. ID is religion posing as science. It posits some unknowable, and unobservable force directing Evolution.

Science has other ideas, huh? What ideas are those again? I'm pretty sure science is about a method and not about preconceived ideas.

Intelligence is not part of the observable universe? Well, I guess it's pretty hard to observe intelligence per se, but I certainly wouldn't call it an "unobservable force." I love your "testimony" about ID. Got any real arguments?

[ruski_canuk]

If I were a biology teacher, I could have an enormous amount of fun, and create (I think) an absolutely fascinating class, teaching the debate between advocates of intelligent design and advocates of random Darwinian variation. I'm quite certain that the students would learn much more biology, and enjoy it far more, than they typically do in most high school classrooms in America.

If I was a biology teacher, I would find the above pompous.

[ruski_canuk]

I completely believe in God as our creator. That has nothing to do with Intelligent Design not meeting the criteria that would enable it to be taught in school as science.

I respect your willingness and desire to reconcile reliable science and religion.

I am curious as to how, and whether, your views would change if evidence for abiogenesis emerged which elevated it to scientific theory (on par with the theory of evolution, gravity, etc).

[thesometimesaint]

Mordecai:

Who said anything about "preconceived idea"? I've got a pretty good idea as to what science says, and I have a pretty good idea about what the religion of ID says.

Glad you asked.

Here is just one of my references.

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=6024#toc

[Luigi]

DNA, which represents a code and produces function and is extremely complex is comparable to writing, in that they are both specified and complex. Scientific hypothesis: the same phenomenon is responsible for the genetic code and writing, i.e. intelligence.

We have observed writing being produced by human beings and only by human beings so naturally it makes sense to attribute it to human beings or human-like beings. DNA production, on the other hand, is done repeatedly without any intelligent oversight as observed in bacteria all the way up to the most 'complex' beings such as humans. Patterns and complexity is also observed without intelligence such as the formation of snowflakes. Consequently writing is complex and is done by humans is a poor argument for DNA is complex and therefore human-like tinkerers plopped life on the earth billions of years ago and occassionally tweaked it to create new life forms that eventually got us to humans. If evolution and random mutation can't explain life then we are simply left with 'we don't know' as the only scientific alternative.

When Newton theorized that planets revolve around the sun due to gravity, when had gravity been observed to have caused entire planets to change their course? What evidence was there that gravity was responsible for planetary orbits?

Newton carefully showed how the observations of objects relative to the earth would, by logical extention of those observations, explain the motion of the planets. Humans writing is not like the production of DNA and in fact DNA production is observed without any intervention of any intelligence so there is no logical extension of human writing to be made toward DNA production.

There is a lot of scientific evidence against Darwinism:

The Deniable Darwin by David Berlinski.

No such thing as Junk DNA.

Forty thousand generations of e-coli with imposed selective pressures do not increase complexity.

Central Dogma [of Darwinism] Revisited.

Have fun!

Any peer reviewed articles published in reputable scientific journals?

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

If I was a biology teacher, I would find the above pompous.

Thank goodness that you are not a biology teacher.

[Mordecai]

We have observed writing being produced by human beings and only by human beings so naturally it makes sense to attribute it to human beings or human-like beings. DNA production, on the other hand, is done repeatedly without any intelligent oversight as observed in bacteria all the way up to the most 'complex' beings such as humans. Patterns and complexity is also observed without intelligence such as the formation of snowflakes.

So naturally it makes sense to attribute writing to humans? How do you know, though, that nature wouldn't produce writing? We all know it can't, obviously, but how do we know? DNA production is done repeatedly without intelligent oversight? DNA replication is done, but that's not exactly production. There is no evidence that Darwinian processes can produce a single increase in complexity. Not ONE piece of evidence. Statistics suggest it is impossible. Snowflakes appear complex; however, the rules that produce them are very simple. So the complexity is an illusion, in that sense. ID rejects patterns that are produced that are created via a high level of chance in nature. That's the same reason we reject nature producing writing.

Consequently writing is complex and is done by humans is a poor argument for DNA is complex and therefore human-like tinkerers plopped life on the earth billions of years ago and occassionally tweaked it to create new life forms that eventually got us to humans. If evolution and random mutation can't explain life then we are simply left with 'we don't know' as the only scientific alternative.

It's not "writing is complex and is done by humans" is not the argument. The argument is that if something is truly complex (without the illusion of complexity) and follows a pattern, then it was most likely produced by intelligence. Why do we believe that? Because EVERYTHING we observe in the present tells us that. So we extrapolate from that methods of interpreting the past, which is how all historical sciences work. Also, you're right. We don't know. Current scientific knowledge says Darwinism would not produce increases in complexity in life. So we don't know. We can't know that intelligence did it. However, there is a logical inference there based on current observations. Regardless, we do not know, judging by the evidence. If scientists were motivated by truth, instead of getting their work read, trying to socially engineer (like they did with the eugenics movement, promoting white supremacy) making money and feeling important, they would say that. That's not going to happen, though. There is no scientific career in saying, "We don't know," unless maybe you're David Berlinski.

Newton carefully showed how the observations of objects relative to the earth would, by logical extention of those observations, explain the motion of the planets.

And ID advocates are attempting to prove their point as well. So what?

Humans writing is not like the production of DNA and in fact DNA production is observed without any intervention of any intelligence so there is no logical extension of human writing to be made toward DNA production.

CFR.

Any peer reviewed articles published in reputable scientific journals?

Other than this one: http://www.discovery.org/a/2177 ? Discovery institute has a list of peer-reviewed articles that support their point of view. We also have the history of biology with a huge hole in the same places over and over, which is to say they have a huge explanatory deficit in the areas that are relevant to ID. Here is an article discussing some of ID's peer-reviewed work: Peer-review, Intelligent Design and John Derbyshire....

[Mordecai]

Mordecai:

Who said anything about "preconceived idea"? I've got a pretty good idea as to what science says, and I have a pretty good idea about what the religion of ID says.

Glad you asked.

Here is just one of my references.

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=6024#toc

My definition of science doesn't include anything supernatural nor does it mention God.

From science made simple:

How do we define science? According to Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the definition of science is "knowledge attained through study or practice," or "knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, esp. as obtained and tested through scientific method [and] concerned with the physical world."

So which part of this excludes ID? Forensic science attributes various phenomenon to human intelligence, eliminating chance or natural causes. Why not do something similar in biology?

[littlechild]

My definition of science doesn't include anything supernatural nor does it mention God.

From science made simple:

So which part of this excludes ID? Forensic science attributes various phenomenon to human intelligence, eliminating chance or natural causes. Why not do something similar in biology?

I love to discuss this topic, it is very clear to me that the Darwinists are covering their tracks much as the young child frightened of monsters smears jello over his bedroom floor. Darwin had no idea how much complexity was involved in a single cell, to him it was a black box. In our day, we know that the simplest life form could not possibly have been anything other than intelligently designed, but, as Kuhn predicts, this simple concept meets the stiffest resistance amongst those who should know better.

Here's a quote I think shows why intelligence is the correct answer to the origin of life. It basically shows that life is so extraordinarily miraculous that it is is not possible for it to have arisen any other way:

[littlechild]

Mordecai:

You can believe in little green men from Mars did it. However science has other ideas.

Evolution posits no force outside of what is in the observable universe. ID is religion posing as science. It posits some unknowable, and unobservable force directing Evolution.

Evolution is not a historical fact, and it cannot be conclusively proven to be such. What can be conclusively proven, is that evolution is ludicrously improbable.

ID is not religion, I don't care what Judge Jones says about it.

Scientists have adopted a metaphysical position when they state with authoritarian thunder that God must not be permitted as a conclusion. This is an 'a priori' conclusion; a metaphysical conclusion, not a scientific one.

In other words, if God DID create the universe and everything in it, the position of Darwinists would not permit you to come to that conclusion. Why? Because they say so, and they have circled their wagons around that point, not because of any demonstrably superior logic or rationale, but due to agenda driven strategic posturing.

The vast majority of evidence points directly to a supernatural, miraculous creation event and the philosophies of men just don't want to admit it no matter to what absurd lengths they must go.

[littlechild]

It meets the definition.

http://www.wilstar.com/theories.htm

Thank you. Let's take a look at the definition shall we?

Development of a Simple Theory by the Scientific Method:

• Start with an observation that evokes a question: Broth spoils when I leave it out for a couple of days. Why?
• Using logic and previous knowledge, state a possible ansser, called a Hypothesis: Tiny organisms floating in the air must fall into the broth and start reproducing.
• Perform an expierment or Test: After boiling some broth, I divide it into two containers, one covered and one not covered. I place them on the table for two days and see if one spoils. Only the uncovered broth spoiled.
• Then publish your findings in a peer-reviewed journal. Publication: "Only broth that is exposed to the air after two days tended to spoil. The covered specimen did not."
• Other scientists read about your experiment and try to duplicate it. Verification: Every scientist who tries your experiment comes up with the same results. So they try other methods to make sure your experiment was measuring what it was supposed to. Again, they get the same results every time.
• In time, and if experiments continue to support your hypothesis, it becomes a Theory: Microorganisms from the air cause broth to spoil.

Now, can you tell me what experiment, other than a thought experiment, which proves that any species can morph into another, has been conducted that other scientists have duplicated and verified?

Or, here's another one: What experiment, duplicated and verified, has shown that life can arise from inert material by undirected processes? OR even directed processes? Why not admit, that AT BEST we don't know how it happened, and THEREFORE admit that the presence of a superior intelligence is possible. Indeed probable. Even likely, based upon our observation and our intelligent ability to recognize patterns?

[Rob Osborn]

Mordecai:

You can believe in little green men from Mars did it. However science has other ideas.

Evolution posits no force outside of what is in the observable universe. ID is religion posing as science. It posits some unknowable, and unobservable force directing Evolution.

I find it interesting that from the Evolutionist side in the ID/ evolution debate, that they always attack the credibility of ID theory even being "scientific", when as stated above they are in the same exact predicament. Let me change things a bit to sho exactly what I mean-

Evolution, regarding the origins of life, is religion posing as science. It posits some unknowable, and unobservable force directing abiogenesis.

How is that not true? Scientists have no data, no conclusive evidence, no idea or active mechanism to direct abiogenesis, and yet they posit it as a scientific theory. Talk about a difference in standards!

Why don'e we all just admit that either undirected abiogenesis is true and Id is false, or that undirected abiogenesis is false thus making ID true?

Certainly, if we prove that abiogenesis fails then that would indeed add validation to ID. It's funny that both evolutionist scientists and ID scientists set out to test the same thing when it comes to abiogenesis- to see if random unguided unintelligent processes can generate life. Its funny that when evolutionists do it and study the data its "science", but when Id'ers do the same exact thing and study the same exact data it's somehow a religious practice.

Now thats interesting!

[Mordecai]

Evolution, regarding the origins of life, is religion posing as science. It posits some unknowable, and unobservable force directing abiogenesis.

Rob, what about all that proof that infinite universes exist, which means there is an infinite amount of luck for our universe? Remember? Oh, yeah, no other universe has ever been observed. I forgot. Carry on. You're right. As a side note, the force they're saying directed abiogenesis is a combination of luck and wishful thinking, a phenomenon you and I might call "hogwash."

[littlechild]

If I was a biology teacher, I would find the above pompous.

And pomposity, as we all know, is absent among biology teachers.

[littlechild]

Mordecai,

Thanks for that link to the Deniable Darwin. That is very well written. I like the story at the end:

On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote

I IMAGINE THIS story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe.

His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that "the Ulysses," mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from "the Quixote."

I raise my eyebrows.

Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer.

"The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden," he says. "They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo."

Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket.

"As you know," he continues, "the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576."

I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed.

"Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor's Los Hombres d'Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza's remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined."

I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. "Is it your understanding, then," I ask, "that every novel in the West was created in this way?"

"Of course," replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: "Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote."

And then, Michael Behe's commentary:

Most people consider Darwinism, whatever its faults, to be science. Yet in an interesting way they are wrong -- at least in my area of biochemistry, the study of life's foundation. Scientific results get reported in science journals, like Nature, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and so forth. But if you search the science journals, as I have done, for detailed explanations of how particular, complex biochemical systems (such as, say, the blood-clotting system or intracellular-transport) were produced, you come up completely empty-handed. Astonishingly, science's own journals contain no explanations. Since science is found in science journals and Darwinian explanations are absent, Darwinism is not science.

[thesometimesaint]

ID is but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

My apologies to Shakespeare.

[Mordecai]

ID is but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

My apologies to Shakespeare.

Wow. That's a great argument. ::snore::

[Jason]

ID is but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

My apologies to Shakespeare.

If you remembered the character of the person who makes that speech you might not want to make it a part of your argument. (Hint: It's someone who murdered for power and ambition who just heard that his wife went mad and committed suicide)

[thesometimesaint]

Jason:

I well familiar with Lord Macbeth, and it is somehow fitting.

[Luigi]

So naturally it makes sense to attribute writing to humans? How do you know, though, that nature wouldn't produce writing?

Nature has never been observed to produce writing so I would assume it doesn't. Similarly life propogates and spreads without any apparent intervention of intelligent agents so I don't assume it's diversity is a result of such.

DNA production is done repeatedly without intelligent oversight? DNA replication is done, but that's not exactly production. There is no evidence that Darwinian processes can produce a single increase in complexity.

We observe increases in complexity across time in the fossil record with no evidence of intervention from an intelligent agent. We assume that life is reproduced the same way we observe it (ie without intelligent intervention) and extrapolate that these changes in species are occurring incremently over time by the same process we observe.

Statistics suggest it is impossible.

Somehow it seems unlikely one would have sufficient information to accurately project the correct probability.

It's not "writing is complex and is done by humans" is not the argument. The argument is that if something is truly complex (without the illusion of complexity) and follows a pattern, then it was most likely produced by intelligence.Why do we believe that? Because EVERYTHING we observe in the present tells us that. So we extrapolate from that methods of interpreting the past, which is how all historical sciences work.

What is the basis for such a premise if not observations of humans? We have no observation of any other intelligence besides humans and so your argument has to boil down to human beings create complexity therefore complexity is a result of human-like intelligence yet your argument falls apart because what we really do in science is attribute structures and items which we have observed in nature only being produced by humans as being produced by humans in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

If scientists were motivated by truth, instead of getting their work read, trying to socially engineer (like they did with the eugenics movement, promoting white supremacy) making money and feeling important, they would say that. That's not going to happen, though. There is no scientific career in saying, "We don't know," unless maybe you're David Berlinski.

Scientists that I have heard speak are perfectly willing to acknowledge there are things they don't know-they just are adamant on where the current evidence stands.

CFR.

I think it is clear that DNA production (or replication if you will) is done without any apparent intervention of an intelligent agent and that writing is assumed to be human because we have no observation of it being produced by anything but humans.

Other than this one: http://www.discovery.org/a/2177 ? Discovery institute has a list of peer-reviewed articles that support their point of view. We also have the history of biology with a huge hole in the same places over and over, which is to say they have a huge explanatory deficit in the areas that are relevant to ID. Here is an article discussing some of ID's peer-reviewed work: Peer-review, Intelligent Design and John Derbyshire....

I asked for peer-reviewed articles from REPUTABLE journals.

[Rob Osborn]

Nature has never been observed to produce writing so I would assume it doesn't. Similarly life propogates and spreads without any apparent intervention of intelligent agents so I don't assume it's diversity is a result of such.

What we observe from the evidence in nature is that DNA exists and for all scientists know has always existed. It is mere speculation on scientists part to say that DNA evolved from a simple language into a complex language.

We observe increases in complexity across time in the fossil record with no evidence of intervention from an intelligent agent. We assume that life is reproduced the same way we observe it (ie without intelligent intervention) and extrapolate that these changes in species are occurring incremently over time by the same process we observe.

No, what we see in the fossil record is lots and lots of dead things. There is no real evidence that the fossil record shows an increase in complexity. Evolutionary scientists want to believe this but it is untrue. In order to really conclude this simple to complexity, they would have to extract DNA samples from all of the fossils to really see how the language became complex. As far as I know, they do not try to extract DNA from anything older than a few hundred thousand years old. Scientists have proven with skull sizes, that small skulls can come from life-forms that are just as complex as life-forms with bigger skulls.

So, I must conclude that just because something may appear to be more complex (bigger skull) this is not scientific evidence that life went from the simple to complex.

Somehow it seems unlikely one would have sufficient information to accurately project the correct probability.

Mathematical odds are placed in all measures of science as a tool- a way to analyze data. Odds are placed upon DNA forensics all the time. Personally I believe the odds of nature writing a complex coded language from nothing is like 1/nothing. There are some things you just can't place odds upon because there is no evidence to back up the probability of it actually happening.

I think it is clear that DNA production (or replication if you will) is done without any apparent intervention of an intelligent agent and that writing is assumed to be human because we have no observation of it being produced by anything but humans.

We have no evidence of the process of the language development (DNA) that evolution says. Lets say for instance that we were to come upon an abondoned wharehouse and that after we went inside we found a sole computer running and on the screen it was performing a program all on it's own. Would we think that it just did it on it's own, or would we conclude that it was only appearing to run on it's own and that actually it was just running a program that some intelligent person caused it to run at some point in the past?

The DNA program is a self replicating program meaning that once initiated (given life in a body structure) it will continue to perpetuate itself just as a programmed computer system will continue to run it's program if it is told to do so. So, what we really see in nature is this complex biological program that digitally codes information for everything on how it operates, to how to build the builder proteins that actually build more blueprints (DNA) of itself. We see the effects of adaptaion in different environments, the effects of mutations and genetic drift. But we do not see any effects of the code actually encoding new intelligent data. So in reality we are left with this paradoxial dilemma in a purely naturalistic point of view (from an evolutionists view) that shows the complexity of life being ran by this complex DNA coded program that doesn't really change much over time and when it does it is almost always negative to it's environment. So how could such a wide diversity of life- from ferns and moss, to elephants, starfish and humans come about from what science has concluded doesn't really change enough to cause such diversity?....Oh yea I forgot- it's called millions of years and chance! I forgot those two things are the major tennets of evolutionary principle- both of which cannot be scientifically validated.

I asked for peer-reviewed articles from REPUTABLE journals.

Does this mean you can't understand it unless it is peer reviewed by your peoples? I am sure glad that we do not hold such standards for the authenticity of our religion by the Smithsonian and like groups.