"Intro to ID" by Gonzalez at U of Northern Iowa

Anytime someone mentions Mt Rushmore in this context, there should be a question in the Q&A:
What about the 'Old Man in the Mountain'? Was it designed or not?

Good work- These guys sound like politicians. The DI must have party whips to send out talking point memos to all their fellows, because they seem to read the same answers from the same scripts.

In fact, all of their minions on the Internet seem to read the same memos. It is disappointing to see that even everyday people talk like politicians now, and nobody seems to have qualms about making an argument they don't understand, if it supports their side.

It is notable that most scientists in this debate attempt de novo synthesis of their understanding of the issues. Of course we learn from others, but mostly we don't go around making claims we don't understand. I think this is what many of us find so aggravating about ID people. We go through the intellectually honest and laborious process of studying, learning and thinking, and IDists just skip ahead, starting with a conclusion and then read a book that purports to justify it. Then, despite circumventing the whole learning process, while making some egregious errors that are clear to anyone who has given serious thought to these matters, they have the gall to tell us we don't understand our field of expertise and aren't open minded enough. *big sigh*

Great example of intellectual charlatanry. If I were going to intelligently design a con-man, he'd come out just like Gonzalez. And like any really good con-man, he's convinced of the "truth" in his circular reasoning and disproven assertions. One has to particularly appreciate the part where he repeatedly affirms that he's not a biologist, yet feels qualified to criticize the fundamental unifying ideas of modern biology as if he understood what they were in the first place.

You have to give him this much... he certainly has balls to stand up on a stage and prevaricate this way in public.

The irony just made me choke on my lunch. I gave a talk in ID for Sigma Xi at the U of Arkansas last week, am giving one tomorrow at Fort Smith, and then to the Physics Department at U of A after that. The main points?
What ID is...
the newest Creationism...
natural Theology...
a theory with no mechanism...
the Biblical God is clearly the designer...
an evangelical fundamentalist Christian right wing plot.
What ID is not...
a scientific research program...
able to detect design.
I use their own words and published statements as much as possible to demonstrate the points.
The only thing I agree on is that some of the premises and claims are falsifiable. Sadly, they have been falsified.

Q: What discoveries would falsify ID? A: for him---finding another planet with life but not good observability; finding life not based on carbon and water. Falsifying the bacterial flagella as IC for Behe, he claims.

Good job on the notes. Don't have much time to comment now, but need to mention a couple of things, maybe more later.

The authors of the book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle are Barrow and Tipler (not Brown). Both authors are cosmologists who show an inclination to use cosmology for theistic purposes. The "anthropic principle" is a hot button issue in physics & cosmology, since in some forms it is used to draw theistic conclusions.

The idea of a "big bang" appeals to theistic people. It would be worthwhile for biologists arguing against ID to learn more about this, because the theistic interpretation of the "big bang" is part of the ID worldview. (Though most cosmologists reject this worldview.)

As for SETI, it seems quite germane. IDers would love to discover intelligent human-like species elsewhere, since if they show the same "design" that would be big time "proof" of ID.

As for SETI, it seems quite germane. IDers would love to discover intelligent human-like species elsewhere, since if they show the same "design" that would be big time "proof" of ID.

What about the 'Old Man in the Mountain'? Was it designed or not?

It would seem that the 1987 court case he was talking about was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard 482 U.S. 578, but it's difficult to see how that case helps his argument at all, since the Supreme Court ruled against the Creationist side. Seventy-two American Nobel laureates in natural science signed an amicus curiae brief in that case. The brief is available on talkorigins.

"Q: Lynn Margulis and symbiotic evolution---she suggests the flagella may have been a free-living spirochete that got co-opted. Might IC be explained by other examples like that? A: I'm not a biologist, but biologists need to be more open-minded."

Crap. There goes my Mark VIII Irony meter.

I don't get why having eclipses is so important.

protein folding and assembly specificity (he kept mentioning Axe over and over throughout the talk---I really wish I'd boned up on the criticisms to Axe's work beforehand); and convergence.

— tara

Since attainment of crude function is the critical initial step in evolutionary innovation, the relatively scant requirements contributed by the hydrophobic core would greatly reduce the initial hurdle on the evolutionary pathway to novel enzymes.

— Axe et al., 1996

It would seem that the 1987 court case he was talking about was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard 482 U.S. 578, but it's difficult to see how that case helps his argument at all, since the Supreme Court ruled against the Creationist side.

— Piltdown Man

Presumably, the reference was to Axe et al. PNAS Vol. 93, Issue 11, 5590-5594, May 28, 1996 "Active barnase variants with completely random hydrophobic cores."

— frank schmidt

"Yeah, but I don't think that was the point of the continual SETI references---it was to hammer home the point that SETI is something that's supported by many scientists, and it looks for "design.""

SETI doesn't look for "design". It looks for radio messages something like the ones we humans send. There's absolutely no analogy to biological "design", since we don't have any organisms that we know we (or anyone else) designed. Even if we had designed organisms, and based design research on that knowledge, we would still be looking for "human-like design", not "intelligent design". How the hell do we know what the evidence of an omnipotent being's design process is? As ever ID begs the question.

I don't get why having eclipses is so important.

How exactly does finding non-carbon based life demonstrate that carbon based life was not designed? It just doesn't logically follow.

Even if we had designed organisms, and based design research on that knowledge, we would still be looking for "human-like design", not "intelligent design". How the hell do we know what the evidence of an omnipotent being's design process is?

As far as this observability aspect of Gonzalez' argument goes, it seems inherently circular. Eclipses are important because we can see them, which proves we must be designed to see them, because they're important.

Who knows what marvelous events happen which are only detectable in the stream of neutrinos that bathes us every second, but since we weren't designed to detect neutrinos these events must not be important.

If "The Old Man in the Mountain" is problematic, you could always fall back on the canals of Mars, or George Bernard Shaw point, or, you know, lots of the false positives that Dembski says don't exist.

SETI doesn't look for "design". It looks for radio messages something like the ones we humans send. There's absolutely no analogy to biological "design", since we don't have any organisms that we know we (or anyone else) designed.

— Ginger Yellow

Because they happen. If they did NOT happen, then NOT having eclipses would be proof of design.

— Flint

"As I understand it, the way we tell if some crop has been genetically modified is by looking up gene patterns in a database of all known human-engineered patterns. "

I'm certainly not an expert, but doesn't the use of mosaic viruses in genetic engineering leave a tell-tale trace, regardless of the specific genes inserted? Of course, this is an inference based on the design mechanism, which is a big no-no in ID.

"There's a logical flaw here. If it is wrong to draw an analogy between "human" design and "biological" design because humans haven't "designed" biological organisms, then it is equally wrong to draw an analogy between "radio messages" "designed" by humans
and "radio messages" "designed" by aliens since we don't know what "alien-designed" radio messages look like either. Just thought this might help."

Three points:

1) We have no point of comparison at all in the biological instance. We don't know for certain any designed organisms, so we can't even guess what they'd look like, let alone how they would be different from undesigned organisms.

2) SETI researchers, out of necessity, make a lot of assumptions, mainly along the lines that intelligent aliens are "human-like". They assume they would use radio waves to send long distance messages, and that those messages would have a recognisable structure that would distinguish them from natural sources. Those assumptions could turn out to be completely wrong, as most SETI researchers would admit, but without them they couldn't even begin to look with our current technology. ID's assumptions (eg IC systems are unevolvable, SC means intelligence) are the theory, and no IDer will admit they could be wrong.

3) SETI researchers don't claim to have constructed a theory of communication.

Steve Case,

At least if you are going to attack Gonzalez's argument, try to argue against something that actually resembles it.

The argument about eclipses goes this way:

A large moon (which is already unexpected for a small inner planet) stabilizes the earth's axis providing both rotational stability (no excessive wobbling) and seasons. Both are considered important for life. Furthermore, the moon is big enough that its tidal effect helps cleanse the oceans and resupply them with nutrients, clearly important. (But not too big, which would cause excessive erosion) Also, it slowed the earth's rotation, also considered to be important. Even the creation of the moon from an impact is probably responsible for our thin, transparent atmosphere. And a new result, newer than the Privileged Planet, argues that if the moon were a little bigger the earth's orbit would actually be unstable. (Dave Waltham, Astrobiology 4, No. 4: 460-468 (2004)) So the moon is big enough to have all these wonderful effects, but not too big.

So the PP hypothesis is that a moon of just the right size is also one that produces good solar eclipses. They in turn are extremely valuable for studying how stars work and, in one famous case, General Relativity.

There's a logical flaw here. If it is wrong to draw an analogy between "human" design and "biological" design because humans haven't "designed" biological organisms, then it is equally wrong to draw an analogy between "radio messages" "designed" by humans and "radio messages" "designed" by aliens since we don't know what "alien-designed" radio messages look like either. Just thought this might help.

Does Jupiter have more eclipses? (smaller sun, many more moons).

Regarding water and carbon--Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon have the chemical and physical properties they do because of the numbers and arrangements of subatomic units, which are consequences of the cosmological evolution of elements (adding protons and neutrons). Because of those properties, they happen to react in certain ways with other elements and are capable of building up into more complex "systems." Isn't this the sort of thing (like mineral crystals)that Dembski said was not specified complexity? The final product comes about, of thermodynamic necessity, because of the basic chemical and physical properties.

Steve Case, At least if you are going to attack Gonzalez's argument, try to argue against something that actually resembles it.

A large moon (which is already unexpected for a small inner planet) stabilizes the earth's axis providing both rotational stability (no excessive wobbling) and seasons. Both are considered important for life.

If I'm not mistaken, Gonzalez uses the example of "eclipses" in order to say that without these "eclipses", Einstein's Theory of General Relativity might not have been proved correct. His argument for design, it would seem, would be weakened if there were, in fact, no "eclipses." So, I don't think Gonzalez would argue as you speculate.

Steve Case, At least if you are going to attack Gonzalez's argument, try to argue against something that actually resembles it.

— David Heddle

A large moon (which is already unexpected for a small inner planet) stabilizes the earth's axis providing both rotational stability (no excessive wobbling) and seasons. Both are considered important for life.

J Mol Biol. 2000 Aug 18;301(3):585-95. Extreme functional sensitivity to conservative amino acid changes on enzyme exteriors. Axe DD. MRC Centre, Centre for Protein Engineering, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QH, UK. Mutagenesis studies and alignments of homologous sequences have demonstrated that protein function typically is compatible with a variety of amino-acid residues at most exterior non-active-site positions. These observations have led to the current view that functional constraints on sequence are minimal at these positions. Here, it is shown that this inference assumes that the set of acceptable residues at each position is independent of the overall sequence context. Two approaches are used to test this assumption. First, highly conservative replacements of exterior residues, none of which would cause significant functional disruption alone, are combined until roughly one in five have been changed. This is found to cause complete loss of function in vivo for two unrelated monomeric enzymes: barnase (a bacterial RNase) and TEM-1 beta-lactamase. Second, a set of hybrid sequences is constructed from the 50 %-identical TEM-1 and Proteus mirabilis beta-lactamases. These hybrids match the TEM-1 sequence except for a region at the C-terminal end, where they are random composites of the two parents. All of these hybrids are biologically inactive. In both experiments, complete loss of activity demonstrates the importance of sequence context in determining whether substitutions are functionally acceptable. Contrary to the prevalent view, then, enzyme function places severe constraints on residue identities at positions showing evolutionary variability, and at exterior non-active-site positions, in particular. Homologues sharing less than about two-thirds sequence identity should probably be viewed as distinct designs with their own sets of optimising features.

J Mol Biol. 2004 Aug 27;341(5):1295-315. Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds. Axe DD. The Babraham Institute, Structural Biology Unit, Babraham Research Campus, Cambridge CB2 4AT, UK Proteins employ a wide variety of folds to perform their biological functions. How are these folds first acquired? An important step toward answering this is to obtain an estimate of the overall prevalence of sequences adopting functional folds. Since tertiary structure is needed for a typical enzyme active site to form, one way to obtain this estimate is to measure the prevalence of sequences supporting a working active site. Although the immense number of sequence combinations makes wholly random sampling unfeasible, two key simplifications may provide a solution. First, given the importance of hydrophobic interactions to protein folding, it seems likely that the sample space can be restricted to sequences carrying the hydropathic signature of a known fold. Second, because folds are stabilized by the cooperative action of many local interactions distributed throughout the structure, the overall problem of fold stabilization may be viewed reasonably as a collection of coupled local problems. This enables the difficulty of the whole problem to be assessed by assessing the difficulty of several smaller problems. Using these simplifications, the difficulty of specifying a working beta-lactamase domain is assessed here. An alignment of homologous domain sequences is used to deduce the pattern of hydropathic constraints along chains that form the domain fold. Starting with a weakly functional sequence carrying this signature, clusters of ten side-chains within the fold are replaced randomly, within the boundaries of the signature, and tested for function. The prevalence of low-level function in four such experiments indicates that roughly one in 10(64) signature-consistent sequences forms a working domain. Combined with the estimated prevalence of plausible hydropathic patterns (for any fold) and of relevant folds for particular functions, this implies the overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as 1 in 10(77), adding to the body of evidence that functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences.

PNAS | April 15, 1984 | vol. 81 | no. 8 | 2421-2425 1984 Birth of a Unique Enzyme from an Alternative Reading Frame of the Preexisted, Internally Repetitious Coding Sequence Susumu Ohno The mechanism of gene duplication as the means to acquire new genes with previously nonexistent functions is inherently self limiting in that the function possessed by a new protein, in reality, is but a mere variation of the preexisted theme. As the source of a truly unique protein, I suggest an unused open reading frame of the existing coding sequence. Only those coding sequences that started from oligomeric repeats are likely to retain alternative long open reading frames. Analysis of the published base sequence residing in the pOAD2 plasmid of Flavobacterium Sp. K172 indicated that the 392-amino acid-residue-long bacterial enzyme 6-aminohexanoic acid linear oligomer hydrolase involved in degradation of nylon oligomers is specified by an alternative open reading frame of the preexisted coding sequence that originally specified a 472-residue-long arginine-rich protein.

I'm still reviewing the latter two, but as stated previously, the first Axe paper seems to strongly contradict ID, in the form of illustrating how Demski's calculations are deeply flawed. WAD calculates the improbability of a protein or group of proteins by assuming a de novo synthesis of amino acid sequences and calculating whether the present structure could have randomly been assembled in this way, thus concluding it out of his universal probability bound when it cannot. However, among the many problems with his assumptions, is that proteins in real life mutate from previous ones, rather than come into being from a random string of peptides. By showing that a general core of hydrophobic peptides supports supports the general structure of many proteins, Axe seems to show that both the probability of deriving one protein from another is not as low as WAD assumes, and that the requirement for the exact sequences we see today is not as stringent to maintain function as WAD assumes. I don't know why Gonzalez would bring up this example, but I can't wait to read the two JMB papers.

Oh my goodness- It is not entirely relevant, but I am right now writing my thesis on a two-gene operon in Mycobacterium avium that contributes to virulence in an unknown mechanism. Both genes share some similarity to others, but not enough to assume function IMO. The second gene in the operon shares similarity to beta-lactamases, D-alanyl D-alanine carboxypeptidases, and 6-aminohexanoate dimer hydrolase from flavibacterium and pseudomonas (mentioned above in the 1984 PNAS paper). These are all different functions resulting from enzymes with high sequence similarity and higher structural similarity. In my mind, the overlap of evolutionary trees drawn by similar gene sequences such as these overlaid over the previous pre-molecular biology trees, and their strong congruence, is the best evidence for evolution. Why would a designer use different but similar paralogous and homologous sequences?

Steve Reuland:

Do you think if we say the same thing enough times, using enough different words and examples, the Heddle or Blast types will ever get it?

"Q: What discoveries would falsify ID? A: for him---finding another planet with life but not good observability; finding life not based on carbon and water. Falsifying the bacterial flagella as IC for Behe, he claims."

So logic is not Gonzalez's forte.

David Heddle - I look at what you contrast with my description of circularity, and I don't see the difference. Eclipses have allowed us to discover some wonderful things, therefore they are crucial to our wonderful knowledge, and only a guiding hand could have made things so perfectly. To quote Dr. Pangloss,

"It is demonstrable," said he, "that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings."

This perfect planet business is one of the sillier parts of the ID spectrum. When my children were five years old, they assumed everything they saw had been put there for their benefit; they have since moved on from that childish point of view.

Gonzalez' first two examples wouldn't provide falsifiability of what ID pretends to be, just of what it really is. There's nothing about finding life on another planet or about finding life not based on C and H2O that falsify the general theory that life was designed--why couldn't the designer have designed other types of life in other places?

What those examples would falsify is the theory of creation of life and the universe by the Christian god according to a literalist interpretation of the Bible that says that anything that isn't explicitly included in the Bible cannot be true. And that's what ID the movement is really about.

Gonzalez' first two examples wouldn't provide falsifiability of what ID pretends to be, just of what it really is. There's nothing about finding life on another planet or about finding life not based on C and H2O that falsify the general theory that life was designed--why couldn't the designer have designed other types of life in other places?

What those examples would falsify is the theory of creation of life and the universe by the Christian god according to a literalist interpretation of the Bible that says that anything that isn't explicitly included in the Bible cannot be true. And that's what ID the movement is really about.

So the PP hypothesis is that a moon of just the right size is also one that produces good solar eclipses. They in turn are extremely valuable for studying how stars work and, in one famous case, General Relativity.

Q #1: Is the fact that we can see "perfect" solar eclipses related to our existence? A: The Earth's surface provides the best view of solar eclipses in the Solar System. The Earth's surface is also the most habitable place in the Solar System. Is this coincidence just that? In The Privileged Planet, we argue that it isn't. The conditions that make a planet habitable also make its inhabitants more likely to see solar eclipses.

Hey Heddle, answer my question, please. Since ID is religious opinion, not science, what makes your ID religious opinions any more authoritative or valid than anyone else's religious opinions? Why should anyone pay any more attention to your religious opinions than they should to mine, my next door neighbor's, my car mechanic's, or the kid who delivers my pizzas?

Other than your say-so?

Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

He didn't really address the "Pandas and People" item, but suggested that anyone who said ID was creationism was just a conspiracy theorist.

Definitions, as used in this Act: (a) "Creation-science" means the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences. Creation-science includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate: (1) Sudden creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing; (2) The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism; (3) Changes only within fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals; (4) Separate ancestry for man and apes; (5) Explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood; and (6) A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.

(1) Sudden creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing;

Is Earth merely an insignificant speck in a vast and meaningless universe? On the contrary. The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery shows that this cherished assumption of materialism is dead wrong. Earth is a lot more significant than virtually anyone has realized. Contrary to the scientific orthodoxy, it is not an average planet around an ordinary star in an unremarkable part of the Milky Way. In this original book, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards present a staggering array of evidence that exposes the hollowness of this modern dogma. They demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also gives us the best view of the universe, as if Earth-and the universe itself-were designed both for life and for scientific discovery. Readers are taken on a scientific odyssey from a history of tectonic plates, the wonders of water, and solar eclipses, to our location in the Milky Way, the laws that govern the universe, and the beginning of cosmic time.

(2) The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism;

Whether or not design constitutes the best explanation for the origin of biological data may be debatable. But one thing is certain: teleological evolution, insofar as it relies on the laws of nature to create, cannot account for the origin of biological information. Indeed, from an empirical point of view, the laws of nature do not have the creative powers that Lamoureux�s position requires. Because Lamoureux and other teleo-logical evolutionists want to limit divine action to the initial creation of the universe and its natural laws (and to the maintenance of those laws thereafter), they must rely exclusively on natural laws and processes to explain the origin of biological form and complexity. This includes not only the origin of novel forms from existing forms, but also the origin of the first life itself. Unfortunately, however, the laws of nature lack the power to create the information rich-structures that characterize biological organisms. Natural laws may well be maintained and have been created by God, as all theists (including Johnson) believe, but the physical and chemical regularities that scientists describe as laws do not (by definition) produce the information-rich configurations of matter that the origin of life requires. God may have created natural law, but He does not use natural laws to create specified biological information.

(3) Changes only within fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals;

From a design perspective, macroevolution is often seen as the "origin of biological novelty," while microevolution is simply variation on a previously existing archetype.

(4) Separate ancestry for man and apes

Q. Do you believe in common descent? A. You mean, common ancestry? Q. Common descent, yes. A. Well, I have difficulty with common ancestry and maybe that's what you mean by common descent. Q. Do you believe in common descent in humans, such as the fact that there were perhominids before homo sapiens? A. Are you asking me if I accept evolutionary thought on this? Q. I'm asking you if you accept prehominids as the ancestral line to homo sapiens? A. Personally I don't, no. Q. You what? A. I personally do not. Q. You do not? A. Yes. I mean, I'm not an expert on this. (Thaxton testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript) ************************************************* Q. You do accept, do you not, common descent within species? A. Within a single species, of course. I don't know anyone who doesn't. Q. What about among species? A. Among species? Well, I stated in my power point that I find it extremely unlikely based on the evidence that the animal phyla are related through common ancestry. Other biologists have said they're dubious of common ancestry at levels higher than that. The levels in between, I don't know. As a scientist I would have to say each case would have to be settled based on the evidence. Q. What about between humans, the humans-- homo sapiens and other species, such as prehominids? A. I think it's extremely unlikely based on the evidence. (Wells testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript) ************************************************* Q. Sir, the first question I'd like to ask you is, do you accept the evolutionary theory of common descent of humans from prehominids? A. From the data that I've been following it's probably not true.(Simat testimony, Kansas Hearings, transcript) ************************************************* Q. Do you-- do you accept the general principle of common descent, that all of life was biologically related to the beginning of life? Yes or no? A. No. Q. Do you accept that human beings are related by common descent to prehominid ancestors? Yes or no? A. No. (Leonard testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript) ************************************************* Q. Do you accept the general principle of common descent, that all life is biologically related back to the beginning of life? Yes or no? A. No. Q. Do you accept that human beings are related by common descent to predominant ancestors? Yes or no? A. No. (Ely testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript) ************************************************* Q. Do you accept the principle-- the general principle of common descent that all of life was biologically related back to the beginning of life? A. Not if you interpret common descent, and realize that I'm taking liberty here, not if you interpret common descent as being that that is natural selection acting on random mutations I do not. Q. Do you accept that human beings are related by common descent to prehominid ancestors? Yes or no? A. No. (DeHart testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript) ************************************************* Q. Do you accept the principle of common descent that all life is biologically related back to the beginning of life? Yes or no? A. I will say no, because -- Q. I didn't ask you for an explanation. Yes or no? A. Okay. No. Q. Okay. Do you accept that human beings are related by common descent to prehominid ancestors? Yes or no? A. No. (Millam testimony, Kansas Hearing transcript) ************************************************* Q. Do you accept the general principle of common descent, that all of life was biologically related to the beginning of life, yes or no? A. No. Q. Do you accept that human beings are related by common descent to prehominid ancestors, yes or no? A. No. (Bryson testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript) ************************************************* Q. Do you accept the general principle of common descent that all life is biologically related back to the beginning of life, yes or no? A. I won't answer that question as a yes or no. I accept the idea of limited common descent. I am skeptical about universal common descent. I do not take it as a principle; it is a theory. And I think the evidence supporting the theory of universal common descent is weak. Q. Do you accept that human beings are related by common descent to prehominid ancestors, yes or no? A. I'm not sure. I'm skeptical of it because I think the evidence for the proposition is weak, but it would not affect my conviction that life is designed if it turns out that there was a genealogical continuity. (Meyer testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript) ************************************************* Q. Do you accept the general principle of common descent that all life is biologically related back to the beginning of life? A. Not as defined by neo-Darwinism, no. Q. Do you accept that human beings are related by common descent to prehominid ancestors? A. I doubt it. (Menuge testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript)

(5) Explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood

(6) A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.

Q. And I'm going to ask you first how old, in your opinion, is the world? A. I'm going to answer like Dr. Sanford earlier, I would say between probably a lot younger than most people think. Q. That doesn't say anything to me. What is your opinion in years the age of the earth? A. I'm fine with 5,000 to 100,000. Q. You're fine with 5,000 to 100,000? A. Correct. (DeHart testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript) ******************************** Q. What is your opinion as to the age of the earth? A. In light of time I would say most of the evidence that I see, I read and I understand points to an old age of the earth. Q. And how old is that age? A. I don't know. I just know what I read with regards to data. It looks like it's four billion years. Q. And is that your personal opinion? A. No. My personal opinion is I really don't know. I'm struggling. Q. You're struggling with what the age of the earth is? A. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure. There's a lot of ways to measure the age. Meteorites is one way. There's a lot of elements used. There's a lot of assumptions can be used and those assumptions can be challenged so I don't really know. Q. What is the range that you are instructing? A. I think the range we heard today, somewhere between 5,000 and four billion. Q. You-- you-- you believe the earth may be as young as 5,000 years old. Is that correct? A. Well, we're learning that there's such a thing as junc -- Q. Sir, answer -- A. -- really has a function. Q. Just please answer my question, sir. A. We're learning a lot about micro -- Q. Sir? MR. IRIGONEGARAY: Mr. Abrams, please instruct the witness to answer the question. CHAIRMAN ABRAMS: I think -- Q. (By Mr. Irigonegaray) The question was-- and winking at him is not going to do you any good. Answer my question. Do you believe the earth may be as young as 5,000 years old? A. It could be. (Ely testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript) ************************************************* Q. The first thing I'd like to ask you is what is your personal opinion as to what the age of the world is? A. I'm undecided. Q. What is your best guess? A. I'm totally undecided. Q. Give me your best range. A. Anywhere from 4.5 billion years to ten thousand years. Q. And, of course, you have reached that conclusion based on the best scientific evidence available? A. Yes. (Bryson testimony, Kansas Hearings transcript)

(a) "Creation-science" means the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences.

"Yeah, but I don't think that was the point of the continual SETI references---it was to hammer home the point that SETI is something that's supported by many scientists, and it looks for "design.""

Back in the late sixties there was a small flurry of excitement in the Physics Department of the University where I was an undergrad, and some of us seniors were sworn to secrecy and told that a precisely periodic radio signal had been received from a specific location in the sky, and that the "best guess" was that it was of alien origin. No known natural process could account for a signal of such regularity.

It wasn't aliens, of course. It was the first observation of a pulsar. People see "design" where it ain't, because they want to.

Kudos to Tara, and to Lenny, and to Frank and Steve.

Much fun reading.

not "Christian plot" or conspiracy theory

Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions. . . . Governing Goals * To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies. * To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God. Five Year Goals * To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory. * To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science. * To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda. Twenty Year Goals * To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science. * To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its innuence in the fine arts. * To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

Who sponsored this talk by Gonzalez? Is he intentionally trying to be denied tenure so he can join the DI martyrs' brigade, by saying stupid things in high profile venues and claiming that anyone calling him on it is an anti-religious bigot?

... to see its in[fl]uence in the fine arts.

— Lenny, citing goals from the Wedge Document,

They assume they would use radio waves to send long distance messages, and that those messages would have a recognisable structure that would distinguish them from natural sources.

— Ginger Yellow

SETI researchers, out of necessity, make a lot of assumptions, mainly along the lines that intelligent aliens are "human-like".

— Ginger Yellow

With biological systems, what reason do we have for even supposing that there might be a "message" or an intent to make design obvious?

— CJ O'Brien

However, among the many problems with his assumptions, is that proteins in real life mutate from previous ones, rather than come into being from a random string of peptides.

— sanjait

Where did the "previous" one come from? Now, do an infinite regress. Thus, where did the "first" protein come from?

'Rev Dr' Lenny Flank

Just because the DI is a group with a christian plot which involves ID doesn't mean all ID work is a christian plot. A lot of work done in spreading evolution was something of a eugenical plot ( Consider Hackel) Yet no one ( Not anyone whose sane anyway) calls Darwin's theory of evolution a eugenical plot, a few of my pantheist, liberal theist etc friends believe in ID, as does my dad ( Who call's himself an atheist, or an agnostic, depending on what mood he's in.)

Wow, Gonzalez "...suggested that anyone who said ID was creationism was just a conspiracy theorist"

I would consider that an honor, something along th line of the ToE being "just a theory" - a structure that coherently explains a set of facts. Therefore the theory is "ID is creationism" and the fact compiler is Lenny (#50197 and 50208).

One might forgive Gonzalez' unfamiliarity with the story of Dr. Pangloss -- but is there anyone in America who has not read Dr. Seuss' Yertle the Turtle?

Both Voltaire and Dr. Seuss have already dealt with Gonzalez' arguments, it seems to me.

With more panache in each case, I might add.

Where did the intelligent designer come from? His mom and dad? Now, do an infinite regress. Thus, where did the first intelligent designer come from?

— Eugene Lai

In the instance that I was responding to, a probabalistic argument was being made along the lines that the probability of forming novel proteins from "previous ones" was not altogether too high. The argument does not fly because you end up going back to the very first protein. How did it form? What were the probabilities of it forming? Quite low, don't you think?

— BlastfromthePast

In mathematics, one can sum an integral from negative infinity to positive infinity and come up with a FINITE sum---that is, a definite answer. The definite answer to your question, then, is that the First Cause is the Intelligent Designer, He who bounds all that is infinite.

(paraphrasing Gonzalez) Having a large moon is also necessary for life, and this makes it more likely to have an eclipse.

— Tara Smith

Yeah, but I don't think that was the point of the continual SETI references---it was to hammer home the point that SETI is something that's supported by many scientists, and it looks for "design."

— Tara Smith

"Then how do you tell if it is a "random" pattern or if you're dealing with "intelligence""

As described above, you can't really. You guess, largely by imagining what you would do if you were trying to either communicate at interstellar distances or simply let "them" know you're there. It's not even a question of "random". There are plenty of orderly patterns that are generated without any intelligence. Pulsars are a good example, already mentioned. We have no idea what we would do if we designed an organism, because as creationists love to point out, we haven't been able to design and create even the most basic self-replicating molecule (from scratch), let alone all the life on earth. Hence we can make no generic assumptions about what evidence of design would be.

"Then why is it so far-fetched to "assume" that "human" intelligence is "Designer-like"?"

This makes no sense. Like what designer? If you mean what I think you mean, as in "Why not assume that all potential designers are like humans?", because we don't know what a designer capable of designing life (and/or the universe) from scratch looks like, or what its design process would look like. And given our rather limited capabilities in the universe and organism designing fields, it's much more realistic to assume that it would be nothing like our own.

A large moon (which is already unexpected for a small inner planet)

— David Heddle

stabilizes the earth's axis providing both rotational stability (no excessive wobbling) and seasons.

— David Heddle

Both are considered important for life.

— David Heddle

Furthermore, the moon is big enough that its tidal effect helps cleanse the oceans and resupply them with nutrients, clearly important. (But not too big, which would cause excessive erosion)

— David Heddle

Also, it slowed the earth's rotation, also considered to be important.

— David Heddle

So the PP hypothesis is that a moon of just the right size is also one that produces good solar eclipses. They in turn are extremely valuable for studying how stars work and, in one famous case, General Relativity.

— David Heddle

For anyone who just wants the newspaper version, I'll try to provide a link to the story when it's published.

— Tara Smith

"Gonzalez spoke at length about his fascination with how people can observe a perfect eclipse on earth because the planet sets up the conditions for it to be observed, for example, by the planet being the correct distance away from the sun."

"The fact that there are conditions for habitability and conditions for scientific discovery" and that they are correlated are not logically necessary, he said. "And chance is not likely to account for it. Therefore, the only option left is design," he added.

How can anyone with a brain make the leap from this A to this Z?

I am so glad that we don't have to rely on this type of "critical thinking" to help cure illnesses or disease.

Just because the DI is a group with a christian plot which involves ID doesn't mean all ID work is a christian plot.

Hi Blast. Welcome back.

Why are the Super Mice not an example of "frontloading", and how can you tell?

What *is* an example of "frontloading", and how can you tell?

Oh, and how big is a dolphin, Blast?

And why should anyoen care about your uninformed uneducated opinions on the matter anyway, Blast?

The definite answer to your question, then, is that the First Cause is the Intelligent Designer, He who bounds all that is infinite.

Eugene Lai

I'd be more then willing to accept there's as much probablity that the giant flying spaghetti monster is the Intelligent Designer as the Christian God ( So long as the Spaghetti monster exists outside of time.) Personally my concept of the intelligent designer is so alien and abstract that I don't really think you could even call it intelligent, it's an abstract order principle ( I argue that it's an abstract order principle because it fufill's the principle of parsimony, it's less complex then either a spaghetti monster or a triune deity.)

Eugene Lai

I'd be more then willing to accept there's as much probablity that the giant flying spaghetti monster is the Intelligent Designer as the Christian God ( So long as the Spaghetti monster exists outside of time.) Personally my concept of the intelligent designer is so alien and abstract that I don't really think you could even call it intelligent, it's an abstract order principle ( I argue that it's an abstract order principle because it fufill's the principle of parsimony, it's less complex then either a spaghetti monster or a triune deity.)

Anytime someone mentions Mt Rushmore in this context, there should be a question in the Q&A: What about the 'Old Man in the Mountain'? Was it designed or not?

— KeithB

Eugene Lai

Where did the intelligent designer come from? His mom and dad? Now, do an infinite regress. Thus, where did the first intelligent designer come from?

The so called "Intelligent designer" ( I use the quote marks because my concept of the intelligent designer isn't really a intelligent being). doesn't require another intelligent designer if it exists outside of time.

by the way, is there anyway to use signatures on this blog?

The faces of mount Rushmore are more complex then the others mentioned, hence there is less chance of occurence by chance, that's why it's valid to infer design with Mt Rushmore, but not with the face on Mars.

when you say that "[i]t's damn hard to compare something we do NOT have, with what it might be like to have it, because we don't have what we don't have," I don't see how you go from that to saying that if there were no eclipses that that, too, would prove "design."

Kindly take note that the notion that the "intelligent designer" is outside of time is radically incoherent.
Design is inherently a temporal process. "Beings" outside of time are thus excluded from the set of possible designers.
Also kindly note that design is neither necessary nor sufficient for creation. We have examples of designed things and we have examples of designs which are not implemented. We also have some amusing cases where a thing can be said to be designed and yet neither the design nor the designer played any role whatsoever in the implementation. (See the notebooks of DaVinci for a plethora of examples.)

hugs,
Shirley Knot

The faces of mount Rushmore are more complex then the others mentioned, hence there is less chance of occurence by chance, that's why it's valid to infer design with Mt Rushmore, but not with the face on Mars.

Where do you draw the line?

If I'm not mistaken, Gonzalez uses the example of "eclipses" in order to say that without these "eclipses", Einstein's Theory of General Relativity might not have been proved correct. His argument for design, it would seem, would be weakened if there were, in fact, no "eclipses."

— BlastfromthePast on September 29, 2005 03:06 PM

As for Our Friend the Moon: Gonzalez & the local trolls might want to (well, probably not, but they oughta) read What If the Moon Didn't Exist?: Voyages to Earths That Might Have Been by astronomer Neil F. Comins. Though Comins doesn't provide much in the way of numbers, his scenario is that if the early Earth had not collided with the planetesimal which resulted in the formation of Luna, it would have had much smaller tides (thus reducing the mineral stirring and intertidal zones possibly required for early complex molecules) but faster rotation & stronger magnetic fields (thus increasing planetary radiation shields and wind/lightning activity, thereby facilitating formation of complex molecules). Net outcome: the "initial propagation of life much have been much slower... [which] would delay all the later stages of evolution compared with their occurrence on Earth [as we know it]." (pp. 15-16)

"Rotational stability" is actually decreased by the presence of Luna, due to the famous 23.5-degree inclination of Earth's axis to the plane of the ecliptic (which the moon shares). This resulting wobble, aka precession, seems to have minimal biological consequences. If Gonzalez has discovered a new aspect of this, no doubt ecologists & others would be greatly interested. Btw, it's that inclination which causes the seasons as we know them, not the moon.

"BlastfromthePast said:
Now Plato---a pagan---believed in a First Cause. Logic demands it. A protein, made up of a string of amino acids, is in turn made up of individual atoms, thus reducing itself down to matter. So, the question arises, What "caused" the atoms to form amino acids, and in turn to go on to form proteins?"

What caused the atoms to form amino acids?

Were you asleep during Chemistry? Or did you even take Chemistry?

To put it simply (very simply in your case), atoms are at a lower quantum energy state when they are in molecules. The molecules stay together because it takes more energy to break them up than it does to bring them together. Amino acids are formed from common smaller molecules linking together. Amino acids are also easy to link together into more complex molecules (that is proteins).

The faces of mount Rushmore are more complex then the others mentioned, hence there is less chance of occurence by chance, that's why it's valid to infer design with Mt Rushmore, but not with the face on Mars.

What were the probabilities of [the first protein] forming? Quite low, don't you think?

LOGICALLY, you have to come up with a First Cause. An infinite regress takes us into the realm of the infinite. There's your answer. It's simple logic.

He who bounds all that is infinite.

Re eclipse thing - so the argument here is that the"designer" set up the world to make it easier on scientists? wtf?

Richard Dawkins admits that biological systems look designed. And, the bacterial flaggellum---well, you know....,

So you're kind of trying to make a Darwinian view of solar systems.... In a way, but let me make a distinction, then, between what we call one-off or single-generation selection, and cumulative, multi-generation selection. A solar system survives because -- let's say, a planet orbiting a star will orbit the star at a particular distance, which is the right distance for that planet and that star. That's the crucial distance. If it was orbiting faster, it would whiz off into deep space; if it were orbiting slower, it would spiral into the star. So, there is a kind of selection of planets to be orbiting at the right speed and at the right distance from their stars. But that's not cumulative selection, that's one-off, single-generation selection. It's like one generation of biological selection. It's like finches who have the wrong size of beak for a hard winter. The ones with the wrong size of beak die, so in the next winter, the next generation have all got the right size of beak. That's one generation. What's really crucial about biological evolution is that that doesn't stop at one generation, it goes on to the next and the next and the next, and it takes hundreds, it takes thousands of generations to build up, cumulatively, the really impressive adaptive complexity that we get in living things, like eyes and elbow joints. So, that's the reason why solar systems don't look very impressively designed, whereas living bodies look very, very impressively designed indeed. They've been through many generations of cumulative selection.

Re eclipse thing - so the argument here is that the "designer" set up the world to make it easier on scientists? wtf?

Yeah, its something like that. According to a certain William Dembski:

"The idea that the world and features of it are designed to help us understand the world and those features constitutes a remarkable insight. Gonzalez and Richards apply this insight mainly at the level of cosmology and astrophysics."

This might be a remarkable insight, but I was wondering why, for example, the fact that we are in a good position to see solar eclipses is actually a prediction of Intelligent Design. Couldn't an Intelligent Designer have equally have arranged things so it becomes very hard for us to get a grasp of whats going on?

Comment #50263 Posted by Hiya'll on September 30, 2005 07:49 AM (e) (s) The so called "Intelligent designer" ( I use the quote marks because my concept of the intelligent designer isn't really a intelligent being). doesn't require another intelligent designer if it exists outside of time.

From the inside flap of Gonzalez's book "Privileged Planet":

Is Earth merely an insignificant speck in a vast and meaningless universe? On the contrary. The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery shows that this cherished assumption of materialism is dead wrong. Earth is a lot more significant than virtually anyone has realized. Contrary to the scientific orthodoxy, it is not an average planet around an ordinary star in an unremarkable part of the Milky Way. In this original book, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards present a staggering array of evidence that exposes the hollowness of this modern dogma. They demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also gives us the best view of the universe, as if Earth-and the universe itself-were designed both for life and for scientific discovery. Readers are taken on a scientific odyssey from a history of tectonic plates, the wonders of water, and solar eclipses, to our location in the Milky Way, the laws that govern the universe, and the beginning of cosmic time.

— Lenny

Ryan, You really are more than dishonest. I never, ever stated that the earth was the best possible observation platform for cosmology and astronomy, nor do G&R in their book.

— Heddle

CJ O'Brien wrote: "With biological systems, what reason do we have for even supposing that there might be a "message" or an intent to make design obvious?" BlastFromThePast responded: Richard Dawkins admits that biological systems look designed. And, the bacterial flaggellum---well, you know....

Bottom line, using SETI as an example causes more rhetorical problems for ID than it solves.

— CJ O'Brien

What were the probabilities of [the first protein] forming? Quite low, don't you think?

— Russell

Quite the contrary. I can say without fear of contradiction the probability is 100%.

Therefore, nothing can exist that bounds anything infinite.

— Russell

Ved Rocke: Thanks for pointing that out. From Heddle's arguments, I'd thought that Gonzalez & Richards were merely being sloppy with the term "correlate". Turns out that they were speaking precisely, but didn't spend any time thinking about where the best place to do astronomy would be independent of habitability. Instead, they assumed their conclusions and built backwards, just like the rest of the ID folk. Live and learn, I suppose.

From Tara's notes, sounds to me like Gonzales held his own quite well against a large hostile audience. What of his defenders in the crowd? You failed to mention them!

This might be a remarkable insight, but I was wondering why, for example, the fact that we are in a good position to see solar eclipses is actually a prediction of Intelligent Design. Couldn't an Intelligent Designer have equally have arranged things so it becomes very hard for us to get a grasp of whats going on?

— SteveF

But logic brings us to the idea of a creator anyway; unless, for whatever reason, we don't want to go there.

From Tara's notes, sounds to me like Gonzales held his own quite well against a large hostile audience. What of his defenders in the crowd? You failed to mention them!

Would you say that deflecting a question about Irreducible Complexity with "Behe has a website dealing with that. I'm not a biologist" is really an adequate answer? Particularly given the fact that he had just spent his talk dealing with evidence for ID and therefore, one would assume, is capable of discussing Behe's notion. Unless of course he was bluffing and hoped no one noticed......

What were the probabilities of [the first protein] forming? Quite low, don't you think?

Can an all-powerful God build something so big that He can't move it? This statement represents a limitation on the powers of our reason, not a true contradiction.

I find Priveleged Planet arguments about eclipses and the perfectly observable sky to be pretty hilarious.

1. The earth's atmosphere is actually only "clear" enough to observe the heavens when the sun is not scattering through it during daylight hours. Meaning, we can only really see anything at night. When we sleep. Why are we not nocturnal if this was the "plan"?

2. Why would eclipses not be seen quite regularly in convenient locations for humans to observe really often, if our observation of them was the plan? What of the countless passes of the moon that don't create a full eclipse anywhere on earth, or anywhere humans congregate, compared to the relatively minute number of perfect passes we can actually see? If an eclipse is observable only from a small swath in the middle of the Indian Ocean should we suspect that it is occuring for the scientific enlightenment of the lucky dolphin or the priveledged tuna?

3. Human eyes can't actually see eclipses, not without horrific damage being done to our retinas. If eclipses are specifically designed for human observation, then why would the act of actually observing the eclipse do such catastrophic damage to our eyeballs? Why were our eyes "designed" in such a way that, looking directly at a total eclipse, which was "designed" for our observation, we can go blind?

From Tara's notes, sounds to me like Gonzales held his own quite well against a large hostile audience.

— kiwi

What of his defenders in the crowd? You failed to mention them!

The new simulations performed by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) researchers show that a single impact by a Mars-sized object in the late stages of Earth's formation could account for an iron-depleted Moon and the masses and angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system. This is the first model that can simultaneously explain these characteristics without requiring that the Earth-Moon system be substantially modified after the lunar forming impact.

"It is now known that giant collisions are a common aspect of planet formation, and the different types of outcomes from these last big impacts might go a long way toward explaining the puzzling diversity observed among planets," says Asphaug.

The Moon is believed to play an important role in Earth's habitability. Because the Moon helps stabilize the tilt of the Earth's rotation, it prevents the Earth from wobbling between climatic extremes. Without the Moon, seasonal shifts would likely outpace even the most adaptable forms of life. "A Moon-less Earth with the same mass, rotation rate, and orbit as today would have the direction of its spin axis vary chaotically between 0 and 90 degrees on time scales as short as 10 million years," says Darren Williams, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Penn State University and NAI member. "At high obliquity, temperatures over mid-to-high latitude continents would reach near boiling 80 to 100 Celsius around the summer solstice under a 1-bar nitrogen- dominated atmosphere. Such temperatures would be damaging to all forms of water-dependent life on Earth today."

"Understanding the likelihood of Moon-forming impacts is an important component in how common or rare Earth-like planets may be in extrasolar systems," adds Canup.

Mr. Heddle, your desire to pick holes in the assertions of various PT members does nothing to support your case. You still don't understand the fallacy of post-facto rationalization you're engaged in. I am beginning to doubt that you ever will.

(1) Life, Reality and everything were designed
(2) We observe X
(3) X is part of everything
(4) Therefore, X was designed.

See? Designed is based on actual observation! It's science. Heddle is right.

quoth the Heddle: "At high obliquity, temperatures over mid-to-high latitude continents would reach near boiling 80 to 100 Celsius around the summer solstice under a 1-bar nitrogen- dominated atmosphere. Such temperatures would be damaging to all forms of water-dependent life on Earth today." Which was more or less denied by many commenters here.

Mr. Heddle you're full of it. Are you saying that Gonzalez doesn't agree with the inside cover of his own book?

Heddle: Just to be clear, my comment in this thread was mainly concerned with Ved Rocke's highlighting the bad science by Gonzalez & Richards, rather than the disconnect between your conclusions and theirs. I should have made that more obvious with some quoted text. Obviously, you and I strongly disagree about a great deal regarding this topic, but the words you quoted were Ved Rocke's, not mine.

David,

What role do you believe the intelligent designer played in the formation of the moon? Did he merely direct an appropriate existing body in the right direction? Did he physically create the moon and fix it in its orbit? Where does the action of a designer stop and plain old natural processes take hold?

Ryan,

Well said.

SteveF,

I have no clue. (Just like someone who is a both theist and an evolutionist can have no clue when God ceases to be the primary mover and switches to secondary causes.)

Planetessimal, corner pocket. Kiss off the blue one, there.

David,

Do you believe there is any way to determine this? You believe there is evidence of design in these observations; can the rationale that led to this conclusion not discriminate between desgined and non-designed processes/features?

Ta.

are you saying that everyone agreed that the moon was important for life?

Such temperatures would be damaging to all forms of water-dependent life on Earth today.

Maybe I misunderstood your question. I believe an object struck the earth and as a result the moon was created. I do not believe God created the moon in situ (I think the designer is God, and don't understand IDers who don't identify the designer with God). I do take earth's moon to be strong evidence for design. I have no clue, however, about God's means for ordaining the collision. I am not sure where you are going, but if it is to show that ID is not science, I have already stated many times that I don't believe ID is science.

Russell, look at #50242 for starters. Or are you saying that everyone agreed that the moon was important for life?

"At high obliquity, temperatures over mid-to-high latitude continents would reach near boiling 80 to 100 Celsius around the summer solstice under a 1-bar nitrogen- dominated atmosphere. Such temperatures would be damaging to all forms of water-dependent life on Earth today." Which was more or less denied by many commenters here.

David,

I'm just trying to get more of a handle on what role the designer played in designing certain aspects of the moon (not for any particularly deep or meaningful reason - I'm just interested in where you are coming from)? Despite taking it as being strong evidence for design are you saying that the design mechanism can not be investigated full stop? Is your methodology for inferring design not able to take this next step?

In addition, as you don't believe that this is within the realms of science, but at some point (presumably) naturalistic processes came into play in this scenario (which can be investigated with the scientific method). Where do you draw the line.

Thanks

Almost an all-bore team of Creationist idiocy one one thread! C'mon, you other funny, unbalanced, vain, stupid, and/or simply ignorant, utterly dishonest creationist trolls! Don't leave it to DH and Blast to mangle verbiage and fact in their increasingly paranoid entry into the realm of outright "Kook." Get in on this thread NOW!

Almost an all-bore team of Creationist idiocy on one thread! C'mon, you other funny, unbalanced, vain, stupid, and/or simply ignorant, utterly dishonest creationist trolls! Don't leave it to DH and Blast to mangle verbiage and fact in their increasingly paranoid entry into the realm of outright "Kook." Get in on this thread NOW!

How odd! I try to be more careful, usually.

Please pardon the 2X.

SteveF,

It is not able to make that step (if it were, it would be a science).

As for doing science, I only assume naturalistic processes. I study gravity using GR or Newton. I don't assume God moves the planets around. However, I see the fact that there are three rapidly expanding dimensions, which is necessary for life, as evidence for design. Hope that helps.

How many times does Heddle need to express the only possible explanation he can find for the container fitting the puddle so exactly? In fact, EVERY container fits EVERY puddle exactly. This cannot be coincidence. It can't be accident. It can't be random. How obvious can it be?

Comment #50380 Posted by David Heddle on September 30, 2005 05:42 PM (e) (s) SteveF, It is not able to make that step (if it were, it would be a science). As for doing science, I only assume naturalistic processes. I study gravity using GR or Newton. I don't assume God moves the planets around. However, I see the fact that there are three rapidly expanding dimensions, which is necessary for life, as evidence for design. Hope that helps.

There are additional benefits for life that would have resulted from a moon forming impact, but I won't mention them---just to spare myself from hearing others deny them without doing their homework.

"A Moon-less Earth with the same mass, rotation rate, and orbit as today would have the direction of its spin axis vary chaotically between 0 and 90 degrees on time scales as short as 10 million years," says Darren Williams...

Three-D is essential for life? Don't tell the string guys that.

The 3 rapidly expanding dimensions comes from String theory.

We all agree that it happened, right? The probability of something having happened, given the fact that it happened, is... (let's see... carry the 4... take the cube root... normalize to boundary conditions...) Yup! It's 100%

— Russell

Really! So how do you tell the difference between a "true contradiction" - one that points out a flaw in logic - and just another pesky limitation on our powers of reason?

— Russell

This makes no sense. Like what designer? If you mean what I think you mean, as in "Why not assume that all potential designers are like humans?", because we don't know what a designer capable of designing life (and/or the universe) from scratch looks like, or what its design process would look like.

— Ginger Yellow

Since you love logic so much, there is no logical reason why the first cause cannot be a dimwit such as the flying spagetti monster. It can bounds all that is infinite with he infinitely long elastic spagettic tentacles.

— Eugene Lai

How typical that Blast would respond with more unsupported assertion, avoid the issue by declaring the discussion of SETI "off topic"(?), and then suggest we should "agree to disagree." Concession accepted.

— CJ O'Brien

Blast:

I had hoped you would reply, but perhaps I made the mistake of being too cogent to notice? I'll save us both aggravation by simply jogging your memory:

Imagine if we did not have eclipses. Would those inclined to see design still do so? Is the bear Catholic? My point is that if you wish to "see" design, then you will see it, no matter what our situation happens to be. Imagine that conditions were such that Phenomenon X (whatever it might be. We don't yet know, because given where we sit, it's not apparent) were easy to observe. In that case, those who see design could say "The fact that we can easily observe X is evidence of design." But sadly, our limited perspective has hidden X from our ken. Does this lack suggest to the design crowd that we are NOT designed? Nope, they just pick something we CAN observe, like eclipses. It simply does not matter what they see.

We could with equal logic say that the fact that we ARE NOT able to observe X (whatever it might be) is also by the designer's intent, for good and sufficient reasons not yet revealed to us. Or we could say that the inscrutability of X is intended to be that way because the designer is testing our creativity for our own good, making us extend our limits. Or whatever ex post facto rationale is pasted on.

In any case, we always circle back to the same place. Gonzalez isn't deriving design from that subset of coincidences (out of an infinity of possibilities) that we just happened to luck into. He starts with design as his conclusion, casts around for justification, and uses our particular situation as though there were something providential about it. And the point is, ANY situation would fill the bill, since the conclusion is already assumed and is not negotiable regardless.

All circumstances (of which all planets are a subset) are "privileged" in having their unique conditions and perspectives. And when all are privileged equally, the notion of privilege becomes nothing but a statement of preference.

David Heddle: "Ahem. Attention God. You are hereby prohibited from creating life in 7 dimensions. Furthermore, you cannot create life out of dark matter, whatever, and wherever, that stuff is. Nor can you possibly create life in a universe with a different cosmological constant. I have no idea what the value of the constant is, but you mustn't change it. Trust me. Don't even think about trying to create life in a universe with 18 types of quarks and three types of gravity. We all know that's impossible. a universe with fermions, bosons, and an unspecified third type, with twice as much vacuum energy, and gravity which violates parity? Look, I ran the numbers, and, well, short answer==nope. The only possible conditions for life in any universe, are the single set I have observed. Thank you for your cooperation."

The First Cause must be simple

I see your opinions about science are just as ignorable as your religious opinions are, Heddle.

And what would be your calculation if we presume---as Darwinian theory demands---that it occurred by chance?

Now, how do you figure that the probability is "quite low"? Please show your calculation.

[Russell:]...how do you tell the difference between a "true contradiction" - one that points out a flaw in logic - and just another pesky limitation on our powers of reason?

[Blast:] Is a photon a particle or a wave? Are you familiar with the dual-slit experiment. Photons---single photons---act either as a particle or a wave depending on the experimental set-up. How can something be both a particle and a wave at the same time? It's a contradiction. But it's also a FACT. Isn't the limitation here our powers of reason?

These three dimensions result in an inverse square law for gravity---which in turn results in stable planetary orbits. Every physics teacher will point out how only in with an inverse square law do we have stable, closed orbits. That's close enought to ID that they probably should be fired, don't you think?

Good points both Russell. Blast assuages us for not having the ability to calculate the probability of the first gene, when we have neither knowledge of how it formed or its sequence or even what macromolecule it was composed of, then ironically he assumes it was improbable.

This, on top of the fact in bringing up the "First" this-and-that diatribe to refute a post of mine, he ignored the original point that we was referring to Demski/Behe's arguments from improbability about the formation of complex structures, not the first gene.

This, on top of failiing to note that "Darwinian" theory doesn't even deal with biogenesis, but rather descent from a common ancestor. That ancestor didn't have just one gene, as there are at least 23 different protein coding genes common to all sequenced life forms from all domains/kingdoms.

I like the wave/particle false dichotomy as well. IDists have framed the issue as design or no design, such that if they can disprove or cast doubt on some aspect of evolutionary theory it somehow is positive evidence for design. While I don't think their babble has discredited ToE at all, even if they someday do it doesn't mean much for intelligent design. Just like the "wave or particle?" question, we can find evidence against concept either, but that merely means neither is sufficient to answer the question, and we have to think of a new concept to define the situation, and new hypotheses to test.

You see Blast and Heddle and all the other IDists (the latter may not claim to be an IDists, but he certainly shares a clade with them), this is why scientists do not respect ID. It's proponents use clearly fraudulent models to make unfounded claims disputing one of the most well-studied theories of our time without even forming a single testable hypothesis.

And Heddle, before you say Gonzales' claim is testable, tell us how we objectively measure observability and habitability to make a correlation.

Let's see, Gonzalez and Rochards claim that a inhabited (by complex life) planet without a large moon would damage their hypothesis. I am pretty sure, sanjait, that one does not need a formal, quantifiable theory of observability for that test.

Now, before y'all attack PP, the issue sanjait raised is quite narrow: the necessity for an objective measurement of observability. The only point I am making is that this test needs no such thing. Nor the test of finding intelligent life on a planet with an opaque atmosphere. Or, finding intelligent life on a planet without a dark night.

You criticism may be applicale to the test of finding an inhospitable planet that is a better observation platform than our local environment, for diverse observations--I agree that it may be difficult to rate observability. However, even their I think that they would say that if it is approximately as good as earth (but inhospitable) then it would falsify their claim.

Lenny, re #50412, I didn't really expect you to say "my bad, you were right about string theory, I misunderstood." That would have taken some integrity and intellectual honesty. I'm just telling you this so that you know you didn't disappoint me.

I have a hypothesis that geography determines cola preferences. It's a perfectly testable hypothesis. For instance, find me a planet with a continent just like North America that has a population with a statistically significantly different ratio of Coca Cola to Pepsi preference. OR, you could find me planets with continents radically different from North America, but whose populations happen to have the same Coke/Pepsi preference.

In the meantime, I'm going to write a book called "The Privileged Cola", go on a speaking tour, and demand that any questions about my reliability as a scientist be thoroughly investigated for any evidence of viewpoint discrimination.

These three dimensions result in an inverse square law for gravity---which in turn results in stable planetary orbits. Every physics teacher will point out how only in with an inverse square law do we have stable, closed orbits. That's close enought to ID that they probably should be fired, don't you think?

Lenny, re #50412, I didn't really expect you to say "my bad, you were right about string theory, I misunderstood."

The only point I am making is that this test needs no such thing.

Good points both Russell. Blast assuages us for not having the ability to calculate the probability of the first gene, when we have neither knowledge of how it formed or its sequence or even what macromolecule it was composed of, then ironically he assumes it was improbable.

— sanjait

You might assume that it was a stepwise process involving an unknown sequence of reactions, no one of which, obviously, can we estimate the probability. In which case, you can "calculate" the probability as somewhere between 0 and 100%.

— Russell

This, on top of failiing to note that "Darwinian" theory doesn't even deal with biogenesis, but rather descent from a common ancestor.

— sanjait

I like the wave/particle false dichotomy as well.

— sanjait

More to the point, what does the validity or otherwise of GR have to do with ID?

— itwit

There's a pattern here. Did Blast answer my question? No. Instead, we get a whole lot of words obfuscating the issue, intimating - I guess - that the question is meaningless.

— Russell

You criticism may be applicale to the test of finding an inhospitable planet that is a better observation platform than our local environment, for diverse observations---I agree that it may be difficult to rate observability. However, even their I think that they would say that if it is approximately as good as earth (but inhospitable) then it would falsify their claim.

It's only in 2-D that inverse-square laws are closed, which is part of the reason Einstein needed 4 dimensions.

You *weren't* right, Heddle.

like all the other IDers, you are just an arrogant self-righteous prick

DAVID HEDDLE is complaining about CREATIVITY, and about the need for someone else to COMPLAIN CREATIVELY!!!!

The greatest curse of being a creationist, on a personal level (since, from my viewpoint, the inability to face the terror that is beautiful and utterly pedestrian in this world, due to an infantile attachment to one's own self-importence is equal to missing at least one of the senses), is the absolute lack of shame, which means an inability to understand irony, or any sort of non-juvenile humor.

Dave H is not worth the value of a Late Weimer banknote. as the person he manifests here. He is a stupidly smug kook who undoubtedly write his posts in the nude with his feet immersed in grape jelly (as a prophelactic measure, with a nod to Our Lord by choosing grape) wearing one of those wool caps with the earflaps (flaps up) and a wall covered in pictures of Willy D. bending over a cauldron of boiling weenies. He is a silly ass who, were he someone's dog, would have had his rear-end shaved and been taught to walk backwards.

He is a pompous jerk, not worth anyone's effort to respond to, or to read: advice I will take from myself from this day forwards.

Thus, their claim is falsified.

Heddle exhibits his own lack of creativity. All he's done, is imagining one change in the known laws, then showing it's incompatible with known life circumstances, and concluding from that, that the current laws are the only ones hospitable to life. An omnipotent God would have infinite choices of laws of nature, types of particles, background temps, etc. It takes some kind of fool to restrict God to merely what he knows about. I guess that's what they mean when they say ID is not only bad science, but bad theology.

Gee, some of you say their claim is unfalsifiable, while others claim it is trivially falsified. My, PT logic continues to amaze.

I'm not going to defend Gonzalez on this point.

You are indeed the cream of Panda's Thumb. How I miss Great White Wonder. His insults were creative.

Thus the odds---strictly from chance--- of forming, let's say, a protein of 100 amino acid length (short by normal standards) is one in 20^100. That is, one in 20 raised to the 100th power, or about 10 raised to the 120th power. This is effectively "impossible." QED

That a photon acts both like a particle and a wave is a "true" contradiction---we know what a particle is; we know what a wave is; they aren't the same thing. Acting like a particle contradicts something being a wave.

There is no reason to presume that a photon has to BE either a wave or a particle.

What's he going to run away and do? ID experiments? Present a paper at an international ID conference? Ha.

The inexorable Blast:

Thus the odds---strictly from chance--- of forming, let's say, a protein of 100 amino acid length (short by normal standards) is one in 20^100. That is, one in 20 raised to the 100th power, or about 10 raised to the 120th power. This is effectively "impossible." QED

So far as I know, no one is contending that a specific protein (note, that's an unstated assumption in your, frankly, inane calculation) "formed by chance". Therefore, the most obviously wrong part of the above is the "QED".

Why does "Introduction to intelligent design" get "scare quotes" from the so called "author" of this post? Was it not really a "introduction" to "ID", did he talk about so called "knitting" instead?

Why does "Introduction to intelligent design" get "scare quotes" from the so called "author" of this post? Was it not really a "introduction" to "ID", did he talk about so called "knitting" instead?

Heddle- If one is to claim that habitability and observability are correlated in the universe, wouldn't you say that it is important for them to have a way to measure both habitability and observability. You make claims about the earth and its moon, but to claim there is a correlation requires us to look at a representative sample of the universe. We can't have a nonrepresentative sample of one and make inferences about the whole universe. Have G&R done these things in a credible way? I think not.

You see, the presence of habitability and observability on earth alone, which from your posts we still apparently can't measure, does not a correlation make. It wouldn't necessarily take the discovery of external life to falsify such a hypothesis. All it would take is to show faults in their sampling methods. But, since we can't measure observability and habitability, by your own admission, such a hypothesis isn't even developed enough to falsify. If you need me to find a definition of "correlation" for you to review, I can find a link for you.

Blast- "Thus the odds---strictly from chance--- of forming, let's say, a protein of 100 amino acid length (short by normal standards) is one in 20^100. That is, one in 20 raised to the 100th power, or about 10 raised to the 120th power. This is effectively "impossible." QED"

What Blast does here is symptomatic of ID information theorists; misrepresent evolutionary theory and then claim to have disproven it. The classic "straw man."

Presently, evolutionary thoerists posit that the first gene did not code a protein, as Blast erroneously claimed all gene's must do. Even today, the oldest genes we know of are ribosomal RNA. These are nucleic acid sequences with enzymatic properties. Our best guess at present is that the first gene, assembled "randomly" from abiotic precursers, was a RNA macromolecule. These are quaternary codes.

The estimation of 1 in 10^120 is wrong for multiple reasons, that scientists who try to think of the real world easily see. For one, that estimate assumes that the first gene was a proteins sequence of 100 amino acids, and that the early earth only synthesized one polypeptide of random sequence to try and hit that one sequence. In the real world, we notice multiple factors which reduce the improbability:

1. numerous sequences, more than we know of, can code for enzymes with similar functions.

2. the early earth was probably conducive to forming macromolecular structures, which means that rather than just one attempt, there were probably very very many.

3. The first gene didn't need to be a protein, and was probably an RNA molecule, which greatly reduces the number of possible conformations.

Blast, predictably, makes similar fallacious assumptions as Demski, when through their lack of understanding of evolutionary process they underestimate the number of viable targets within the search space and underestimate the number of searches that take place within it.

So, do I think it was improbable that any self-replicated RNA molecule could be formed in an RNase-free reducing environment? Not at all. And you should really reserve the ostentatious "QED" for a time when you have actually demonstrated something significant.

So far as I know, no one is contending that a specific protein (note, that's an unstated assumption in your, frankly, inane calculation) "formed by chance".

— Russell

There is no reason to presume that a photon has to BE either a wave or a particle.

— Russell

Oh yea Blast, I almost forgot the wave/particle thing, where you also missed the point.

If something, such as a photon, appears to be wave-like and particle-like, according to our understanding of what those defintions mean, that isn't a contradiction. That just means neither of our definitions is accurate to describe a photon, and we don't know what exactly it is. Just because something "isn't particle" doesn't mean that it "is wave," as it is clear to see in this example.

This is similar to how IDists claim by disputing evolution, they aren't somehow demonstrating intelligent design, they are only nominally demonstrating that evolutionary theory is not yet sufficient. That is, if any of the ID's baloney about IC or the EF were actually credible, that would be the case.

If something, such as a photon, appears to be wave-like and particle-like, according to our understanding of what those defintions mean, that isn't a contradiction. That just means neither of our definitions is accurate to describe a photon, and we don't know what exactly it is.

— sanjait

[Russell:]So far as I know, no one is contending that a specific protein (note, that's an unstated assumption in your, frankly, inane calculation) "formed by chance". [Blast:]Could you please translate this into English?

How did the phrase "common descent" come to be used to mean "common ancestry", anyway? I can see how that'd be confusing to somebody not used to the term.

Henry

So far as I know, no one is contending that a specific protein (note, that's an unstated assumption in your, frankly, inane calculation) "formed by chance".

Could you please translate this into English?

You simply don't know what you're talking about.

Believe it or not, sanjait, there are things beyond human comprehension---as humbling as that may seem.

— Blast

I love it when someone who thinks the universe was created for him and his kind tries to tell the rest of us about humility. What's especially ironic here is that same someone is pretending to make a point about the "limitations of human comprehension", while arguing against my suggestion that perhaps a photon is an entity that does not fit into one of the neat categories thus far recognized by human comprehension.

Presently, evolutionary thoerists posit that the first gene did not code a protein, as Blast erroneously claimed all gene's must do.

— sanjait

So far as I know, no one is contending that a specific protein (note, that's an unstated assumption in your, frankly, inane calculation) "formed by chance".

— Russell

If Blast refuses to understand evolution, why bother trying to explain wave-particle duality to him?

If there's anyone at all out there that thinks that Blast's latest "contribution" is anything but nonsense, please leave a note. Otherwise, I will assume that its foolishness speaks eloquently for itself.

I find it amusing that Blast now wants to yammer about quantum mehcanics, when he quite obviously doesn't know any more about it than he does about whales.

— RDLennyFlank

I find it amusing that Blast now wants to yammer about quantum mehcanics, when he quite obviously doesn't know any more about it than he does about whales.

— steve

1 I didn't say what you quoted me as saying.
2 I have a degree in physics, and have taken 3 Quantum Mechanics classes, so don't bother letting me know anything. In the meantime, don't try to lecture us all about the subject.

If you have access to a university library, and it looks like you do, go check out a few basic explanations of evolution, such as What Evolution Is, by Mayr.

Henry J: How did the phrase "common descent" come to be used to mean "common ancestry", anyway?

Why do you think Anthony Flew became a believer?

Lenny, one doesn't need to know much about quantum mechanics to know about a photon.

What I find kind of interesting is that Heddle - allegedly a physicist himself - had been hanging around this thread, and evidently did not feel any urge to set Blast straight. What's that all about? Perhaps it's a corollary of Reagan's 11th commandment ("never speak ill of a fellow Republican"): "Never admit that a fellow IDer is ever wrong about anything"

Russell:

I think you're on the right track. The only reason the big tent hasn't blown down is because of this tacit agreement that the enemy of my enemy is my friend -- and "Darwinism" is the enemy.

I noticed that the ARN board allowed self-styled anti-Darwinists to say anything they wished about anybody, using any language they found amusing. *Defending* yourself against such people gets you banned. Yet these people were often in violent disagreement with one another, but never corrected one another even once. And some of what they wrote was simply factually wrong (and obviously so), but these errors were never corrected either, even by those whose religious position was very different.

So I can guarantee that Heddle will NEVER correct Blast about even the most fundamental or simple-minded physics (or any other scientific) error. These errors are, of course, NOT random. Every one of them just happens to support a shared religious position. Wasn't it you who wrote "..it may seem like fraud/but lying's a virtue when you're lying for god"?

Man, that's brutal. It takes me a dozen tries to open this thread without Explorer crashing (no other thread causes this), each post to this thread crashes Explorer (no other thread does this), and takes a great deal of work with it. Anyway, I think Russell is right. It's entirely a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and without any queston "Darwinism" is the enemy. Jeffrey Dahmer could defend ex post facto ID circularity of the dumbest stripe, and Blast and Heddle would compliment him on his culinary acuity.

Imagine for a moment how much progress Real Science would make, if in an effort to circle the wagons against religious-inspired idiocy, scientists agreed never to criticize one another or even *notice* the most elementary blunders. That sort of conspiratorial "you ignore my back and I'll ignore yours" approach only works when all the answers are already known. Blast is lying for Jesus. Heddle knows he's lying, but "lying's a virtue when you're lying for God". Some genius wrote that here recently, as I recall.

"the details of a theory disproven by the very facts that are intended to prove it"

"the weaknesses that exist in Darwinian theory"

"Darwinism will one day be looked upon like the plague; as something that almost knocked the life completely out of biological sciences"

"a probable, reasonable answer to species formation".

About wave-particle duality - as English doesn't seem to have a generic word for whatever a photon is (for some reason, the term "wavicle" never caught on), I suppose people will sometimes use the word "particle" for photons (and other quantum "particles"), but yeah, it's not really a particle in the classic sense of that word.

---

Re ""Descent" seems to have been used as standard English in Darwin's day for what we now call ancestry"

Oh, so "common descent" is left over from 19th century English - sort of an illustration of the topic of that new thread, "The words of the world".

Henry

If you have access to a university library, and it looks like you do, go check out a few basic explanations of evolution, such as What Evolution Is, by Mayr.

— steve

I didn't say what you quoted me as saying.

— steve

To Smug and Arrogant Red Mann:

In answer to query#1: The fossil record
In answer to query#2: I did that already, but apparently you weren't paying attention. You can go back and look (unless, of course, the post was, let us say, deleted).
In answer to query#3: That is my opinion. It's rather straightforward what I say. And, if in my lifetime, I'm proved wrong, I will retract it. But don't bet on my having to do that.
In answer to query#4: I'm still looking. When I find something, I'll be sure to let you know.

Blast is lying for Jesus.

— Flint

Lenny, one doesn't need to know much about quantum mechanics to know about a photon.

— RDLennyFlank

Basing that opinion on your, uh, vast knowledge and experience with nuclear physics, are ya?

Why do you think he shortly afterwards decided that ID was a load of cow crap?

— RDLennyFlank

Being a physicist, why don't the unbelieveably low probabilities involved in random mutation bringing about ordered change throw you for a loop?

Being a physicist, why don't the unbelieveably low probabilities involved in random mutation bringing about ordered change throw you for a loop? Have you read Fred Hoyle's book on the "Mathematics of Evolution"?

My main interest in evolution has to do with "macroevolution." I've read the pertinent sections of Mayr's book and it sounds like complete gobbilly-gook. I have yet to find a book that even begins to make sense when it comes to macroevolution.

Why do you think he shortly afterwards decided that ID was a load of cow crap?

What are you talking about?

"I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction. . . . I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder." -- Anthony Flew

Darwinists know everything, even the secret motives of other men.

BFTP wrote: To Smug and Arrogant Red Mann: In answer to query#1: The fossil record In answer to query#2: I did that already, but apparently you weren't paying attention. You can go back and look (unless, of course, the post was, let us say, deleted). In answer to query#3: That is my opinion. It's rather straightforward what I say. And, if in my lifetime, I'm proved wrong, I will retract it. But don't bet on my having to do that. In answer to query#4: I'm still looking. When I find something, I'll be sure to let you know.

As to you, Red Mann, how very smug and arrogant you are. You, like Lenny ask silly questions. The only un-silly question you ask is relative to Gould. The weaknesses that Gould addresses have to the do with explaining the absence of intermediate fossils through his theory of punk-eck, and his admission that advances in organic forms aren't always directly affected by NS in his espousing of "exaption." Gould, much like most other Darwinists, tried to face the actual failings of the theory. He tried to be scientifically honest. I give him credit for that.

And I don't mind telling you. Darwinism will one day be looked upon like the plague; as something that almost knocked the life completely out of biological sciences. But, of course, you can always prove me wrong. I dare you! Go ahead!

I've looked for a probable, reasonable answer to species formation; and neo-Darwinism isn't the answer

David

Just to clarify, when you said:

"The 3 rapidly expanding dimensions comes from String theory. They already know.

You were making sense until you parroted the tiresome "well a really clever designer could do anything" refrain."

You were responding to 'steve' and not SteveF (i.e. me!). I personally know nothing about string theory; I look at pollen samples in my research, which is about as far away from string theory as possible.

The Mt. Rushmore argument is very similar to what proponents of random number generator experiments (RNG) in 'psi' research do when they appeal to meta-analysis of aspirin studies. They say something like '..the effect size of the combined results from the aspirin studies is smaller than that in the RNG studies, and therefore there is evidence for these 'psi' anomalies'. That is, they attempt to infer the existence of something we don't know exists based on something we obviously know exists.

And it is a poor argument.

If you were honest with yourself, you would know that there is a perfectly good answer and ToE is it.

— Red Mann

Dear Blast,
Which of Darwin's specific predictions are invalidated by which specific aspects of the fossil record?
Or are you parrotting again (still)?

hugs,
Shirley Knott

Why does "Introduction to intelligent design" get "scare quotes" from the so called "author" of this post? Was it not really a "introduction" to "ID", did he talk about so called "knitting" instead?

— Russell

Why do you refer to them as "scare" quotes? I assumed that that was the title of his talk - or possibly Dr. Smith's paraphrase of the title - and the quotes were there for the same reason I might put quotes around Dickens's "Great Expectations".

Shirley:

These "failed predictions" are to be taken as a matter of faith. But I have to admire Blast's phrasing. He implies that unless you lie, you are dishonest. Have we gone through the looking glass yet?

You were making sense until you parroted the tiresome "well a really clever designer could do anything" refrain

David Heddle: "Ahem. Attention God. You are hereby prohibited from creating life in 7 dimensions. Furthermore, you cannot create life out of dark matter, whatever, and wherever, that stuff is. Nor can you possibly create life in a universe with a different cosmological constant. I have no idea what the value of the constant is, but you mustn't change it. Trust me. Don't even think about trying to create life in a universe with 18 types of quarks and three types of gravity. We all know that's impossible. a universe with fermions, bosons, and an unspecified third type, with twice as much vacuum energy, and gravity which violates parity? Look, I ran the numbers, and, well, short answer==nope. The only possible conditions for life in any universe, are the single set I have observed. Thank you for your cooperation."

No. Not Cordova. I'm sure of that, but I can't reveal my methodology. It's kind of like Specified Complexity that way.
Probably one of Dembski's other sycophants though.

If you were honest, then you'd admit that the fossil record contradicts Darwin's predictions, hence invalidating his theory regarding macroevolutionary changes.

Gee, some of you say their claim is unfalsifiable, while others claim it is trivially falsified. My, PT logic continues to amaze.

Henry J: Oh, so "common descent" is left over from 19th century English - sort of an illustration of the topic of that new thread, "The words of the world".

Man descended from the apes - and has not stopped descending since.

Hmm...yeah, Blast might not be Salvador. Like Charlie Wagner, Salvador craves attention too much to use a pseudonym. So let's see...who could be Blast. We need someone with Salvador's illogic, but better spelling. Well, it's either T.Russ, or Casey Luskin.

I think I'd lay money on Blast being T.Russ.

Moses, That's a great paper, here is a quote:

The Moon is believed to play an important role in Earth's habitability. Because the Moon helps stabilize the tilt of the Earth's rotation, it prevents the Earth from wobbling between climatic extremes. Without the Moon, seasonal shifts would likely outpace even the most adaptable forms of life. "A Moon-less Earth with the same mass, rotation rate, and orbit as today would have the direction of its spin axis vary chaotically between 0 and 90 degrees on time scales as short as 10 million years," says Darren Williams, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Penn State University and NAI member. "At high obliquity, temperatures over mid-to-high latitude continents would reach near boiling 80 to 100 Celsius around the summer solstice under a 1-bar nitrogen- dominated atmosphere. Such temperatures would be damaging to all forms of water-dependent life on Earth today."

— David Heddle in Comment #50343 on September 30, 2005 03:22 PM

Which was more or less denied by many commenters here. Of course, the source of this report is the lunatic right wing ID spouting government agency (NASA) and Bob-Jones's sister fundamentalist university (Penn State), so it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Gonzalez et al also argue that the moon is "just massive enough to stabilize this planet's 23.5-degree axial tilt. If the moon were any smaller, the tilt of our planet could vary as much as 30 degrees over the course of a year. "

BTW, is "itwit" just "nitwit" without the "n"? Have I found you out? ;)

— BlastfromthePast on October 1, 2005 04:32 PM

No, the only thing that has been found out is your lack of reading skills, and that the word inwit is apparently not part of your vocabulary.

— inwit

Dear Blast, Which of Darwin's specific predictions are invalidated by which specific aspects of the fossil record? Or are you parrotting again (still)?

— Shirley Knott

The coupling of those two sentences is deceptive. Hoyle"s argument in that book is not primarily about "the unbelievably low probabilities involved in random mutation bringing about ordered change ...".

— RBH

T. Russ, is that you?

You're right Blast- The fossil record doesn't support evolution, it supports the sudden appearance of species out of thin air. All those pre-hominids are really just people who were sick or slouchy, and are in no way indicative of transitions between modern Pan and Homo. The dinosaurs were just large domestic dogs, which in no way resemble birds or reptiles. And all the other fossils that resemble but are not identical to other fossils which seem to form a tree pattern are just some sort of wierd coincidence. And all the molecular evidence, all those trees that we draw using similarity among genes shared by all the phyla on earth today that happened to coincide with trees drawn based on morphological, biochemical and fossil evidence are just a giant crazy coincidence. And IDists have a much better hypothesis (poof!) to explain how this coincidental tree came to be, and how in earth's history species came and went at different times and changed over time, and to what happens when all those admitted microevolutionary changes accumulate over thousands or millions of years. All of evolutionary biology is just a giant atheist conspiracy, even though most evolutionary biologists aren't atheists.

Your logic is overwhelming, and I can't believe how thoroughly wrong I was not to accept it. Oh and I almost forgot, I can't believe how your use of creationist buzzwords like "transpeciation" and "interspeciation" failed to compel anyone in this forum to your side. All of PT must be under the influence of the devil. Maybe instead of reasoning with them, we should just perform a mass html exorcism. Someone please close this thread before I read it again.

"He (Darwin) predicted that the fossil rock prior to the Cambrian would show almost the same degree of diversity as we now see. (That helped him believe that the eye might be the by-product of NS; i.e., he needed the extra geologic time)."

Do you really think that Charles Darwin, well before even the discovery of DNA as the genetic material, would have an accurate conception of the molecular clock? Diversity can change over time, and the fossil record is not a representative sample. These are both tenets of modern (as in now, not Darwin's time) evolutionary theory. Do you think paleantology is just a giant conspiracy against ID Blast? Or does the fact that everyone who knows anything about biology disagrees with you not give you pause?

I feel like going in a church and arguing with them about the Bible. Even though I know almost nothing about it, as long as I have the will and get some talking points from a website I'm sure I'll have enough ammo to annoy them for hours.

Gonzalez et al also argue that the moon is "just massive enough to stabilize this planet's 23.5-degree axial tilt. If the moon were any smaller, the tilt of our planet could vary as much as 30 degrees over the course of a year. "

Earth tilts 23.5 degrees varying from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees over several thousand years...If our moon were as small as [the] Martian moons, Earth's tilt would vary not three degrees but thirty degrees. (PP p. 4-5)

There is, of course, a dearth of intermediate forms

Then, of course, there's the Cambrian Explosion

And, of course, the problem of stasis.

I'm sure you're familiar with his "tornado going through a junk-yard" comment.

Now I could be wrong,

made me rather sure that neo-Darwinism wasn't the answer for transpeciation.

He predicted that the fossil rock prior to the Cambrian would show almost the same degree of diversity as we now see.

— sanjait

Do you really think that Charles Darwin, well before even the discovery of DNA as the genetic material, would have an accurate conception of the molecular clock?

Once again, we see that ID does nothing more than parrot the same tired old arguments amde by creation 'science'. ID simply has nothing new to say.

— RDLenny Flank

Given that, why should anyone pay any more attention to your religious opinions than they should to mine, my next door neighbor's, or the kid who delivers my pizzas?

— RDLenny Flank

And why, again, should anyone care about your uneducated uninformed opinion on the matter?

— RDLenny Flank

[sanjait:]Do you really think that Charles Darwin, well before even the discovery of DNA as the genetic material, would have an accurate conception of the molecular clock? [Blast:]Why don't you try reading the Origin of Species?

No, Lenny, what we see are Darwinists who do a whole bunch of hand-waving instead of addressing the arguments; and, so, the arguments don't go away. At least Gould had the guts to address the issues.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists---whether through design or stupidity, I do not know---as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. (Steven Jay Gould)

Attention all Trolls: please note the issue at the moment is not whether tPP is right on this point, it is whether inwit has accurately represented their claim.

Blast: "Why don't you try reading the Origin of Species?" Great idea. Then I'll go and study calculus by reading newton and leibnitz. After that I'll study the solar system by reading Galileo's work.

I haven't read Darwin's book because I'm a molecular biologist in the year 2005, not a naturalist in 1890. Blast again, again missses the point. You can try to disprove the conjecture of Darwin and evolutionary theory from over 100 years ago all you want, but it makes no difference. We have made numerous discoveries to expand and affirm the ToE since then.

In just the last 20 years scientists have completely sequenced hundreds of organisms with samples from every kingdom, and taken ribosomal RNA from many more, and and found these sequence data totally support the evolutionary tree. Does it surprise you to know that Blast? Or, will you continue to ignore it and refuse to understand it, just like when I mentioned it in my last post, because it is so damning to the critics of evolution?

Go ahead and read the Origin of Species by candlelight and find all the faults with it you want to confirm your worldview. Meanwhile, with stinging irony, all the evidence we need to confirm the theory of evolution is sitting freely available on the government's National Center for Biotechnology Information BLAST server. If you are ever honestly interested in how we know species are related, this is the step 1 in the way modern evolutionary biologists analyze sequences: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/ When you are done with that, we can talk about drawing trees with similar sequences using ClustalW and the concept of bootstrapping. Or, you can continue to believe it is all conjecture and atheist conspiracy.

Given that, why should anyone pay any more attention to your religious opinions than they should to mine, my next door neighbor's, or the kid who delivers my pizzas?

My opinion is neither uneducated nor uninformed---quite the contrary.

You can try to disprove the conjecture of Darwin and evolutionary theory from over 100 years ago all you want, but it makes no difference. We have made numerous discoveries to expand and affirm the ToE since then.