The I in ID

Actually, from what we know, intelligence has never given rise to life. Life is, by definition, natural.

How could I cite something that has never happened? (This is the "you can't prove a negative" problem.)Show me a recorded or observed act of intelligence creating life. Even if life was created by intelligence, that intelligence must have been natural. Since there's no difference between life processes and natural processes, we know that life is natural. I would have thought that was obvious.

I'm fairly sure that neither of my parents designed me, and nobody else was there (I hope...) Of or subject to the laws of physics. Of or subject to the laws of physics. I don't think you'll find anyone here - except the creationists - who claims to know how life came to be. Unfortunately the precursors of life may have left little evidence except that contained in every one of us.But ignorance is not a reason to conclude ID.

I understand their role - they had no role in "designing" me.Rather, they engaged in a natural biological process that, without their input, selected a mix of their chromosomes to pass on to me.At no point did "design" occur, unless you think it's possible to design without using your brain. (Is that where you get these arguments, perhaps?) I will grant you that my definition is broad but it is not in any way ambiguous.That that is of or subject to the laws of physics is natural. That that is not of, or not subject to, the laws of physics is supernatural.No ambiguity whatsoever. I don't know how they came to be. You don't know, of course, that they haven't always been, or that it's possible for them not to be.But my ignorance is no reason to conclude design. I'm saying that life is natural because it is subject to the laws of physics. How did it come to be? According to the laws of physics. I'm not against it; there's just no reason to believe it because there's no evidence of it.However, the laws of physics do exist, and life is subject to them. That's evidence that the laws of physics governed the origin of life. What observation, specifically? When have you observed intelligent entities designing life from lifelessness?

In which part of their theories?I'm not aware that Newton's Laws of Motion postulate a Creator; or that Pasteur was able to vaccinate against rabies by appeal to supernatural beings. In what way?Maybe you need a simple example to start on. Why don't you look at a kidney dialysis machine and the Segway scooter and tell me what, as a result of their design, you can tell me about their creator, Dean Kamen? Then we can verify your conjectures via Kamen's biography. Except, obviously, for biological systems, for which the cause is not definatively known.

In which theories, specifically? Again, Newton's laws of motion make no mention of a creator, nor did Pasteur's rabies vaccine appeal to supernatural entities.In which scientific theories did Newton and Pasteur include the supernatural, specifically? But archeologists don't acertain aspects of the populations that lived in the areas they study; what they do is acertain what aspects of human populations that have already been observed can be reasonably applied to the population that lived where they're studying.In other words, archeologists can only find out those things about past humans that we can observe in present ones. What present intelligence are you observing that can tell you about whatever intelligence created living systems? The only known intelligence is human, and human intelligence can't be responsible for life, because how could we be there before we were created?There's no other known intelligence, so there's no intelligence you can scientifically postulate is responsible for life. ID fails simply because there's no avaliable known intelligence to do the deed. Because you've based it on circular reasoning: "We know that every IC system is caused by intelligence, therefore biological systems are caused by intelligence; we know that biological systems are caused by intelligence therefore all IC systems are caused by intelligence."The only way you can assert that "all IC systems are caused by intelligence" is if you assume what you're trying to prove; that is, biological IC systems are caused by intelligence.Well, there's no reason to believe that they are. Simply because intelligence can cause IC systems doesn't mean that intelligence is always the cause of IC systems.

This is just untrue, and you can prove it by inspection.On this very planet living things inhabit every range of temperatures, from the frozen deeps of polar seas to super-boiling magma vents at the ocean floor.It is true that the majority of living things are adapted to the specific climate that they inhabit, and therefore are dependant on the Earth's temperature being roughly what it is now.But suppose we were a little closer to the sun, and that the Earth was 40 degrees hotter. The life that would evolve on that Earth would be adapted to that temperature, obviously.The existence of life adapted to those temperatures proves it. There's no requirement that the Earth's distance from the sun be exactly what it is now.Use some sense, and learn about life before you make these foolish pronouncements. Simply chance. If it had been any other distance, life would have been adapted to that distance.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-01-2004 12:52 PM

So was I. Is there a reason you ignored my post?

1) The unraveling of photosynthesis in 1946;
2) The discovery of sickle-cell anemia in 1949;
3) The Miller-Urey experiment in 1953;
4) The discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953;
5) The development of the contraceptive pill in 1954;
6) The discovery of the chemical basis of vision in 1956;
7) The discovery of the structure of hemoglobin in 1959;
8) The discovery of the Hayflick Limit in 1961;
9) The discovery of the endosymbiosis of cellular organelles in 1967;
10)The discovery of rnadom molecular evolution by Kimura in 1968;
11)The creation of semi-dwarf wheat by Norman Borlaug (credited with saving more lives than anyone else in history) in 1970;
12)The discovery of biological self-recognition in 1971;
13)The invention of genetic engineering in 1973;
14)The discovery of genetic "molecular clocks" in 1975;
15)The development of monoclonal antibodies in 1975;
16)The discovery of oncogenes in 1980;
17)The discovery of prions in 1982;
18)The discovery of molecular elements of memory in 1983;
19)The development of genetic fingerprinting in 1984;
20)The discovery of SRY genes on the Y chromosome in 1991;
21)The first mammalian clone in 1996;
22)Completion of the human genome sequence in 2000Dates from The Science Book, edited by Peter Tallack, published by Weidenfield and Nicholson. That's simply impossible, as sophistry cannot be denied.Science deals with the reality as it is apparent to us. There's no way to know if that reality is the same as the "real" reality. This is a trivially obvious philosophical point.Science is not the search for truth. Science is the search for accurate, predictive models. None of those were theories, though. Conjectures, perhaps.Not until Darwin proposed a sufficiently robust mechanism for evolutionary change did it become a theory.

So, no theories. At no point did Pasteur, Newton, or any of the others invoke the supernatural in their scientific theories.Which is just as I said. Please, don't misrepresent my argument by failing to respond to the entire point. What I said was this:

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But archeologists don't acertain aspects of the populations that lived in the areas they study; what they do is acertain what aspects of human populations that have already been observed can be reasonably applied to the population that lived where they're studying.

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Archeologists don't deduce aspects of their studied populations from nothing but their artifacts. From observation of living populations they ascertain what aspects they can apply to the studied ones.So, what intelligent, supernatural designer have you observed, from which to deduce what aspects your proposed designer of life will have? What's arrogant about it? What did I say that wasn't true?Is it true that humans are the only intelligent organisms we've ever observed?Is it true that humans were not, by any indication, present 4 billion years ago?Those are not controversial or arrogant positions, to my mind. They're simply statements of fact. But we observe the evolutionary creation of IC systems. So clearly, intelligence is not responsible for every IC system. The evolution of lac operons in E. coli. Case closed.

In which of his scientific theories did he do that?That's the question you refuse to answer, presumably because you know the answer as well as I do: Newton never invoked God in his scientific theories, only in his metaphysical speculations. In which scientific theory? It's quite correct. For instance, no consensus about the methods used to construct the Pyramids was reached until people attempted to use those same methods in the same situations faced by the ancient Egyptians.So, in regards to supernatural beings using supernatural methods to create life, what supernatural beings have you observed? What supernatural methods have you attempted? By the definition of IC: Remove any element of the lac system in E. coli and the whole system fails.In an experiment, that whole system was stimulated to evolve again in a population. That's natural selection and random mutation creating an IC system. What else could have been? Bacteria possess no intelligence to "redesign" themselves; and they certainly contained no convinient genetic "program" that would have responded to the situation by "regenerating" the lac operons, because if they had, every bacteria would have done it.Random mutation is an inevitable result of physical law; no genetic duplication can be perfect. Natural selection is an inevitable result of biological reality; every generation in a stable population contains more organisms than can survive in the environment. That these forces were the source of the evolution of an IC system is irrefutable.

It's actually fairly obvious you have little or no training or education in biology; otherwise you would have known that when you write the name of a species, like E. coli, only the genus name or inital is capitalized.I find it rather hilarious of you to critique Mr. Hambre for some supposed ID "ignorance" when you yourself are ignorant of the basic nomenclature of biology.

His isn't, but this one is:

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Res Microbiol. 2004 Jun;155(5):352-9.

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Adaptive mutation and amplification in Escherichia coli: two pathways of genome adaptation under stress.

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Hersh MN, Ponder RG, Hastings PJ, Rosenberg SM.

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Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, One Baylor Plaza, Rm S809, Mail Stop 225, Houston, TX 77030-3411, USA.

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The neo-Darwinists suggested that evolution is constant and gradual, and thus that genetic changes that drive evolution should be too. However, more recent understanding of phenomena called adaptive mutation in microbes indicates that mutation rates can be elevated in response to stress, producing beneficial and other mutations. We review evidence that, in Escherichia coli, two separate mechanisms of stress-induced genetic change occur that revert a lac frameshift allele allowing growth on lactose medium. First, compensatory frameshift ("point") mutations occur by a mechanism that includes DNA double-strand breaks and (we have suggested) their error-prone repair. Point mutation requires induction of the RpoS-dependent general stress response, and the SOS DNA damage response leading to upregulation of the error-prone DNA polymerase DinB (Pol IV), and occurs during a transient limitation of post-replicative mismatch repair activity. A second mechanism, adaptive amplification, entails amplification of the leaky lac allele to 20-50 tandem repeats. These provide sufficient beta-galactosidase activity for growth, thereby apparently deflecting cells from the point mutation pathway. Unlike point mutation, amplification neither occurs in hypermutating cells nor requires SOS or DinB, but like point mutation, amplification requires the RpoS-dependent stress response. Similar processes are being found in other bacterial systems and yeast. Stress-induced genetic changes may underlie much of microbial evolution, pathogenesis and antibiotic resistance, and also cancer formation, progression and drug resistance.

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As is this one:

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Genetics. 2004 Aug;167(4):2015-26.

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Evolution of specialists in an experimental microcosm.

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Dykhuizen DE, Dean AM.

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Department of Ecology and Evolution, SUNY, Stony Brook, New York 11794.

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The impact of adaptation on the persistence of a balanced polymorphism was explored using the lactose operon of Escherichia coli as a model system. Competition in chemostats for two substitutable resources, methylgalactoside and lactulose, generates stabilizing frequency-dependent selection when two different naturally isolated lac operons (TD2 and TD10) are used. The fate of this balanced polymorphism was tracked over evolutionary time by monitoring the frequency of fhuA(-), a linked neutral genetic marker that confers resistance to the bacteriophage T5. In four out of nine chemostats the lac polymorphism persisted for 400-600 generations when the experiments were terminated. In the other five chemostats the fhuA polymorphism, and consequently the lac operon polymorphism, was lost between 86 and 219 generations. Four of 13 chemostat cultures monomorphic for the lac operon retained the neutral fhuA polymorphism for 450-550 generations until they were terminated; the remainder became monomorphic at fhuA between 63 and 303 generations. Specialists on each galactoside were isolated from chemostats that maintained the fhuA polymorphism, whether polymorphic or monomorphic at the lac operon. Strains isolated from three of four chemostats in which the lac polymorphism was preserved had switched their galactoside preference. Most of the chemostats where the fhuA polymorphism was lost also contained specialists. These results demonstrate that the initial polymorphism at lac was of little consequence to the outcome of long-term adaptive evolution. Instead, the fitnesses of evolved strains were dominated by mutations arising elsewhere in the genome, a fact confirmed by showing that operons isolated from their evolved backgrounds were alone unable to explain the presence of both specialists. Our results suggest that, once stabilized, ecological specialization prevented selective sweeps through the entire population, thereby promoting the maintenance of linked neutral polymorphisms.

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What I think is great is that the Lac operon in E. coli is so well-understood - that it so predictably evolves in E. coli if lac-negative specimens are placed on a lactose substrate - that its a common research model. In a peer-reviewed journal?

You have to suffer from a stupendous lack of imagination in order to give any credence to the idea that IC is some kind of barrier to evolution.And let's keep in mind that even when humans intelligently create IC systems, they're doing so through natural processes. Everything that humans do, they do through natural processes.To suggest, then, that natural processes can't result in IC systems is idiotic - the fact that humans can make such systems means that natural processes can make them, because humans use natural processes to make things.Show me a so-called ID "theorist" and I'll show you someone who spends so much time looking at made things that he never stops to think about how people make things.

I thought it was this one:F = G Ma Mb / r2 + God