Help me understand Intelligent Design

Compare it to the continued existence of homeopathy... It makes no sense, but "making sense" is not the most important criterium for some opinion or worldview to exist, sadly.

I am a fool to take this seriously, but I am also too headstrong to let you get away with this, you obnoxious Belgian.Too much of anything is harmful, but that doesn't mean that the substance itself is poison. If you eat too much bread, you burst. Hence, bread is poison?The term 'water intoxication' is a bit misleading, I think. If the body's reaction to too much water were purely physical - like bursting intestines, or a ruptured bladder or some other unpleasantness like that - it would probably not be called 'intoxication'. But since the body can also show a physiological (biochemical) reaction to too much water, it's tempting to use the term 'intoxication', because real poisons have similar physiological effects.I maintain that water is not poison, and to prove it, I will now personally drink a glass of the stuff.{drinks}Well, I am still here, so that proves my point conclusively.Now you will excuse me, I have to go and do something I shall not mention explicitly in polite company.

Don't you see the obvious mistake?You only have one data point! That is anecdotal evidence. Your experiment sucks seriously from a methodological point of view and is therefore nonsense.You should drink 5000 glasses in a short period of time and come back to report. (edited spelling)This message has been edited by Annafan, 06-10-2005 03:09 PM

I wasn't trying to prove that drinking too much water would do me no harm, I only wanted to prove that water is not poison.I have to admit that, to be on the safe side, I did not use concentrated water. I may be a fool, but I am not crazy.

Well, there's two problems. The first being that there is absolutely no evidence for it and plenty of evidence against it.ID says that all birds are birds and that all lizards are lizards. That it's impossible for dinosaurs to have evolved into birds.But we have very good evidence that that is exactly what happened. So either the evidence if wrong, or the invisible magic man behind ID is wrong.If the people who supported ID said, "hey, this is what we believe, let us teach it in our churches" then no one would have a problem with it. Where we run into trouble is when they say "this is what we believe let us teach it in your science classes."It's not science, and worse it's one particular religions take on the world. It doesn't belong in school.The "contraversy" over this whole issue is based in this -The American education system is absolute crap. The conservatives have hit upon a terrific system. Cut education funding, cut intelligence. Cut intelligence, get re-elected. Get re-elected, cut education funding.The dumber the American public gets the easier it is for this government (and it's supporters - big business and the religious right) to dictate what the country is allowed to believe.

That's a good plan. Here's some questions you want to ask them:How does Intelligent Design work?
How does the Designer force these things to happen?
Is there any evidence FOR Intelligent Design (as opposed to AGAINST evolution)?
If there are no transitional species / no macro-evolution, how do you explains Archaeoptryx?Good luck getting answers. Haven't been able to get those questions answered myself

Thanks to all who replied, I think I'll be sticking around for a while.

I don't think it is correct to generalize so much. It appears to me (but I'm a bit confused by them) that some IDers accept ALL of the descent with modification of ALL organisms (even humans from "apes"). They just don't think that mutations plus selection could have done all of it. There are, they seem to say, a few places where something else had to be at play. Where those places are and why seems to shift around a lot but that's the story that I think I see.

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I don't think it is correct to generalize so much. It appears to me (but I'm a bit confused by them) that some IDers accept ALL of the descent with modification of ALL organisms (even humans from "apes"). They just don't think that mutations plus selection could have done all of it. There are, they seem to say, a few places where something else had to be at play. Where those places are and why seems to shift around a lot but that's the story that I think I see.

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I'm not familiar with ID yet, but I was attracted to it because it seems to raise a question without impossing an answer. Maybe an IDer can clarify, but that question would be, Can Evolution, based on the current data, explain the great complexity of organisms without the intervention of a Designer? Who or Whatever that Designer may be.That's an attractive question in light of scientific knowledge we have. It's a legitamite question. Which doesn't necessarely involve that everyone is going to Church tomorrow if it turns out that we're unable to circumvent an affirmative answer to that question. But some people are as extreme as to call this a "right-wing conspiracy"? Galileo in reverse all over again Now, I read the opposing arguements before even deciding to buy Behe's book, which I haven't read yet, so I'm very circonspect. However, if Irriducible Complexity or not, I find that pure random mutation due to climate or other related evolutionary factors alone, does not provide a satisfactory answer. I try to understand how that could makes sense, in light of everything we know, but I don't see it ? On the Evolution thread, I questionned the possibility of the random attribution of some highly complex "specificalities" in certain species, providing that they are clearly "advantages", which logically have a "purpose", allowing certain species to survive. Like a Leaf looking insect for example. No real satisfactory answer as it pertains to how that could have occured randomly. I mean, on The Panda's Thumb web site, Andrea Bottaro, an immunologist and molecular biologist at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, posted a response to Behe's use of Sermonti’s book, entitled “The leaf insect before the leaf”. He wrote what I guess he felt was a "definitive" response to ID. But other then pointing out Sermonti's obvious taxonomic errors, I was extremely disapointed at the way Bottaro danced around technicality while systematically avoiding to adress the real central issue. Which is, how does it look JUST LIKE A LEAF by random chance? Like, all taxonomic technicalities aside, how does it adopt, randomely, such a specific morphological mimicry of the very food it eats as it's adaptive strategy? Again, by mutation and climate and the magic stick of probability ? I mean, we all heard of: you are what you eat, but this is rather extreme? Yet, though he admits "many are amazing in their mimicry", Mr. Borrato didn't really feel it was relevant to ask why and how, so he left it at that. Maybe because his entomological expertise on the question is as questionable as he claims Behe's is? But he..just...doesn't answer or remotely adress the question..unfortunately.So when I read his, among others, very 'dance around to issue' as claim that this IS the "definite response" to ID, I was like, that's it?? And I haven't even read Behe's side of the story yet. Which in turn, got me interested to do so.Here is Borrato's "dance around" response and the dogmatic comments of atheist fanatics who for many, couldn't remain objective enough to see the obvious flaw in Borrato's response:
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Random mutation alone won't do it.Random mutation combined with a selection process, however, will do it. This successful combination is not only the source of the limited complexity in the natural world, but its such a creative force that engineers and programmers are exploiting it to craft designs for circuits and software that are far too complex to have been designed by our intelligence directly.The question is not if natural processes can result in the complexity we see in the natural world, because its pretty obvious that they can. The burden of proof is on those who would posit that intelligence can design things as complex as living things, because to date, no known intelligence has ever been able to do so. Because those organisms that did not look enough like leaves were eaten by predators, and their genes were selected from the population.Mutation expands the diversity of a population; selection contracts that diversity. Mutation acts at random, but selection is anything but random.

I'm not so sure of that.According to Lynn Margulis, some part of bio history has involved symbiotic associations becoming unions. I'm inclined to think she is right, at least in some cases. And that would be neither mutation nor natural selection.

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But other then pointing out Sermonti's obvious taxonomic errors, I was extremely disapointed at the way Bottaro danced around technicality while systematically avoiding to adress the real centralissue. Which is, how does it look JUST LIKE A LEAF by random chance?

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But that ISN'T the real central issue. The REAL issue is whether Sermonti's cliam, repeated by Behe was true or false. And Bottaro took that issue head on. It is false.It is also false to suggest that Bottaro did not address the issue - although there was no detailed explanation because it is so well known: And he's right. A greater resemblance to a tick menas a greater chance of not being noticed by a predator. Even a diguise that will nt bear direct examination may be able to pass a casual glance. This is a wel-known issue which is why Sermonti made the claim that he did. Mimciry is no mystery - but mimicry can't work if there is nothing to mimic - an insect can't be mistaken for a leaf if there are no leaves.

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So when I read his, among others, very 'dance around to issue' as claimthat this IS the "definite response" to ID, I was like, that's it?? And I haven't even read Behe's side of the story yet. Which in turn, got meinterested to do so.

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That's your complaint about the article ? THat it isn't enough to actually address the subject ? That it must instead be aimed specificially to educate you on every relevant point that you do not understand ?

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Here is Borrato's "dance around" response and the dogmatic comments of atheist fanatics who for many, couldn't remain objective enough to see the obvious flaw in Borrato's response:

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Since the "flaw" is simply an error on your part - and thereofe completely absent from Bottaro's post - it hardly takes a "fanatical atheist" to ignore it. I

I've heard her name before. Isn't she the one who took the podium at a recent conference and proclaimed that Neo-Darwinism was dead, and that symbiogenesis is the only significant source of speciation?I'm somewhat inclined to think that she overstates her claims. And it seems to me that the poster I responded to meant to refer to "complexity" in the form of morphological characteristics, for which random mutation and natural selection are still considered the primary driving force. As far as I understand Margulis's ideas, they refer to speciation itself, not so much the development of physical characteristics, and so I don't quite think that they apply here.Interesting point, though. It's never as simple as any of us make it out to be, is it?

I'm quite certain that she greatly overstates her claims.I do think she may be correct in some cases. In particular, she is probably correct that a symbiotic union was involved in forming eukaryotes. It is possible, but less certain, that it was involved in the origin of major phyla. Her idea that it is involved in speciation is, in my opinion, nonsense.

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Random mutation alone won't do it. Random mutation combined with a selection process, however, will do it.

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This axiom, and it's ok to call it an axiom, doesn't explain the notion of purpose though, nor does it constitute a problem for it either. At any level whatsoever. I don't know if you'll understand what I mean by this, but I tried to word it as specifically as I could.Mutation + natural selection = evolutionNo problem at all. It's a fact. It's undisputable and has been verified on so many levels.This is not the problem. The problem is puporse of the design. I don't know if that's what IDers are saying. But that's my querrel personally.Meaning to say, in this above equation, should we put the word "purposely designed" or "random" in front of "mutation". Does this "natural" selection occur by chance alone and entirely so? If it has a purpose, can it be qualified as chance? If the purpose is highly specific, doesn't that make it even harder to use the word "chance" so easiliy? Because if chance can apply on some level, on other levels, it becomes more difficult to see it that way. It's the same way Newton's Mechanistic Physics models worked to some extant on a Macrolevel, but on Microlevels, with atomic and subatomic particles, that model doesn't work, thus Quantuum Physics saved the day and models were revised to explain for example, howcome matter at that level, sometimes, seems only to have a 'tendency' to exist.Thus, I pointed out that the Borrato response was weak in that it didn't adress any fundamental aspects of the question of design. It adresses the numerous taxonomic errors of Sergenti. But that's scientifically not good enough of a rebutal, because it bares not consequence on the initial proposed question.

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but its such a creative force that engineers and programmers are exploiting it to craft designs for circuits and software that are far too complex to have been designed by our intelligence directly.

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The question is not if natural processes can result in the complexity we see in the natural world, because its pretty obvious that they can. The burden of proof is on those who would posit that intelligence can design things as complex as living things, because to date, no known intelligence has ever been able to do so.

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Wouldn't that alone warrant the question of, how could the complexity of natural selection occur by chance then?It would seem like a legitamite question to ask?

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Because those organisms that did not look enough like leaves were eaten by predators, and their genes were selected from the population.

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That still doesn't, when we analyse that response specifically in light of the initial question, provide an answer to explain how it popped up to be morphologically almost identical to the food it eats, by chance of mutation. You won't randomly mutate into Mr. Potato-Head if you eat nothing but potatos for 2 000 000 years straight, even if you and your ancestors live in a potato field for that amount of time, simply because some mean wolves happen to live around that field to pray on you (edit).

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Mutation expands the diversity of a population; selection contracts that diversity. Mutation acts at random, but selection is anything but random.

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Again, it still raises the legitimate scientific question: Is it "random" or "designed" or "planned"?This message has been edited by ausar_maat, 10-08-2005 01:09 PM