Why is the Intelligent Designer so inept?

In the context of this thread, I see two different primary arguments for design. One is the argument from perfection or perfect design, whereby the universe is perfectly designed for life, and each organism is perfectly designed for its environment.The other is the argument from just plain old design, whereby the appearance of design is obvious by inspection.The former argument, the argument from perfection, loses just from sheer incompatibility with the real world. More than 99% of all species that ever existed are extinct, and no current species is perfectly adapted to its environment - so much for perfection. Anyone pushing the argument for perfection has to immediately begin qualifying their definition of perfection, usually in theological and religious ways having nothing to do with science. This form of the argument from design usually comes from traditional creationists trying to argue from an ID perspective, but like Pandas and People all they've done is substitute the phrase "intelligent designer" for "creator" in their vocabulary.The latter argument, the argument from just plain old design, usually referred to as intelligent design, does not require perfection. A frequent response to this argument is that the designs are too poor to be considered intelligent, but I don't myself understand this argument. If we're correct in believing that human beings are intelligent, then quite obviously intelligence is capable of not only non-optimal designs but even piss-poor designs. The quality of a design is a function not only of the degree of intelligence brought to bear on a problem, but also a matter of practical constraints, of existing technology and expertise, and of available resources in both time and materials.If we are designed, then it seems to me that whoever designed us is pretty darn intelligent. Given the difficulty we're having designing even just a simple cell, technologically they'd have to be far beyond us. And given that they're doing it on the scale of an entire planet, their resources must be far beyond our own. And given that they never leave any evidence of their handiwork behind they must be extremely clever, even going to the extreme of designing in a way that precisely resembles evolution, including DNA sequences.Of course there are other variations to these two arguments from design, such as the "design-and-go" designer who, for example, just creates the universe and sets it in motion, then steps back to watch, but those kinds of arguments aren't being considered in this thread.What the IDists have is an idea, a hypothesis. But instead of submitting their hypothesis to science and the scientific method they instead insist to the public at large that it is valid scientific theory being suppressed by a paranoid scientific community intent on protecting the dogma of evolution at all costs. Unfortunately, the public at large loves conspiracy theories.Anyway, if I'm correct in claiming that there are actually two distinct arguments from design being considered in this thread, then I think it would be a good idea to make clear which one this thread addresses.--Percy

Yup!I wouldn't call it perfect, but if designed it's one damn fine one.--Percy

Yup! Loved your version of the Lord's Prayer.--Percy

This sounds like a testable hypothesis. Is there any evidence supporting it?--Percy

Clarifying your argument, you're saying that new phyla are no longer emerging, and this is true. A new phylum would be analogous to a new branch growing from the base of a tree's trunk. While this is a possibility, it is not a requirement of evolution.Given that all ecological niches are currently filled, the emergence of new phyla would be extremely unlikely at this time. Continuing the analogy with a tree, increasing diversity today takes place nearer the canopy than the base of the trunk, and Peepul provided a very nice graph of the number of families plotted over time. Rather than just pointing us at a link, could you summarize what Paul Chien says that you think refutes the possibility of hox gene evolution? Uh, we know the odds against DNA forming by chance all at once are astronomical. No one in science believes that DNA formed suddenly by some miraculous chemical accident, not on earth and not in space. It was you who raised the possibility of not just DNA but entire organisms arriving from space back in Message 209: Perdition was originally just trying to point out the illogic in your argument. The arrival of entire organisms or just DNA from space does not imply intelligent beings. If you think there's a chain of logic that arrives at that conclusion then you'll have to elucidate it for us.What science does know is that complex organic molecules like amino acids and sugars arrive from space all time riding on meteorites. Conditions in space are apparently adequate for their spontaneous formation. I'm familiar with Lynn Margulis's work, but I don't know what a "complexity theory of evolution" is. Regardless, there are no aspects of evolutionary theory that ignore the relevant effects of mutations, or even more outlandishly, that pretend that mutations don't happen.By the way, you do not need the modifier "unguided." The entire natural world is unguided. There is no such thing as a "guided mutation" in nature. For a guided mutation you'd have to go to certain specialized labs where scientists have the technology to do the guiding themselves.--Percy

Hi TraderDrew, I'll address your consecutive posts beginning with your Message 223 in a single message. Your main point was about diversity. As Peepul pointed out with his graph, diversity has increased over time by an enormous amount, but at levels lower than phyla, such as the families in his graph. As I explained in my subsequent Message 222, there is no requirement that diversity occur at any particular point on the tree of life. Given that all the significant ecological niches are already filled, it is very unlikely for new phyla to emerge. As with trees in a forest, new branches occur closer to the canopy than the trunk. You've missed Taq's point. He probably figured you already knew about Linnaeus and was brief because he thought you only needed reminding. The point is that phyla are just a human construct resulting from our attempts to categorize life, and that our current classification system was invented, for the most part, by Linnaeus.Phyla and all the rest of the categories like class, family and species, are just classifications that serves as a valuable aid to understanding, but you're talking about phyla as if they were real things. That's okay, I don't think that's a serious problem, though Taq probably disagrees, but I just wanted you to understand that you missed what he was trying to say.But there is an important point to be made. The organisms at the base of the tree of life no longer exist, so they can't evolve new phyla. The only organisms that exist are at the leaves of the tree. Evolution can only operate on life that actually still exists, and all life that exists is a leaf of the tree. No new branch can ever emerge from near the tree's trunk because all that life is long-extinct. Sufficient evolutionary change requiring the addition of a new phyla is still possible, as has happened in the distant past. It may be happening right now for all we know, but evolution just follows the requirements of the environment, and we cannot predict the future. I did read it and couldn't see how it constituted a rebuttal to the possibility of hox gene evolution. Why don't you try to argue Chien's position and see how much sense it makes when you try to say it in your own words? Besides, the Forum Guidelines advises against bare links:

5. Bare links with no supporting discussion should be avoided. Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references.

Moving on: Is that what you were proposing when you mentioned DNA coming from space? That all six feet of human DNA came from space? I hope that's not what you were trying to say. Watch Dawkins answer Stein's question in the movie Expelled beginning at 3:10 in this YouTube video: Stein asks what Dawkins thinks of the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be the answer, and Dawkins answers by describing how any such idea can only result in an infinite regression. That's where if you believe that life couldn't have formed spontaneously on earth and wasn't created by God, then it must have been created by intelligent aliens. Where did the intelligent aliens come from? Well, if you believe that life couldn't have originated spontaneously anywhere in the universe and wasn't created by God, then it must have been created by some even greater intelligent aliens. Where did these even greater intelligent aliens come from? Well, if you believe that life couldn't have originated spontaneously anywhere in the universe and wasn't created by God, then it must have been created by some even greater yet intelligent aliens. See where this is going? Either it's an infinite regression going further and further back in time to ever greater intelligent aliens, or at some point you have to say, "God did it."In other words, Dawkins explained how intelligent design is really just a well disguised religious appeal to God. Stein didn't understand the explanation, as is clear from his overdubbed comments. Dawkins believes DNA had natural causes, and nothing he said in Expelled indicates any differently, so I don't see how you picked up the impression that he thinks that "DNA had to have some sort of origin outside of natural causes." Science doesn't dismiss possibilities. But it can only consider possibilities for which there is evidence. While intelligent design advocates believe that the mere existence of the universe and life is evidence for an intelligent designer, as Dawkins pointed out ultimately this is just an appeal to God, so obviously the evidence IDists think they see is misperceived. Margulis understands that random mutations are the grist that drives the evolutionary mill. Wherever did you get the idea that she didn't?By the way, are you inserting

at the end of some of your paragraphs? If so then you needn't bother, they have no effect. If you're not putting them in then let me know because it means there's a bug somewhere.--Percy

What does this imply? I'd like to know what it even means before I think about what it might imply. How does the "strength of diversity" of phyla or species manifest itself? Is this "strength of diversity" a measure of their rate of increase, e.g., the number of new phyla created per million years versus the number of new species created per million years? Or is it a measure of the number of species per phyla? Neither of these possibilities support what you say next, so I have no idea what you mean. The Cambrian Explosion is just the name that was chosen when at first it appeared that evolution was very rapid during this period. We now know that the Cambrian explosion lasted a long time, and that it includes a portion of the preCambrian period. It probably lasted around 60 or 70 million years. We can compare more recent rates of evolution to the rate of evolution then. 70 million years ago mammals were minor role players and dinosaurs ruled the earth, while today dinosaurs are extinct and mammals (especially people) rule the earth. That's an enormous amount of evolutionary change, yet there was nothing exceptional about this rate of evolution over the past 70 million years. The same is true of the rate of evolution during the Cambrian.But the Cambrian is the period when a great many new body plans emerged, phyla if you like. The reasons for this are no mystery - they're quite obvious, in fact. The late preCambrian and on into the Cambrian was when multicellular life first appeared, along with hard body parts which preserve much better in the fossil record, and these factors opened up an enormous number of new ecological niches into which newly evolved lifeforms radiated, and the hard body parts created the illusion of sudden appearance in the fossil record. But with the discovery of more and more soft bodied predecessors we now understand that it was nowhere near as sudden as originally thought, and that the pace of evolution during this period was no greater than today. The mechanisms are descent with modification (mutations and allele remixing) and natural selection. By the way, the point you were originally trying to make about Lynn Margulis was that she rejects mutation as a significant driving force of evolution. This isn't true. What she actually believes is that DNA contributed by viruses and bacteria play a far greater role in eukaryote evolution than mainstream biologists currently accept. But the important point is just one of terminology: changes to DNA caused by viruses and bacteria are still called mutations. Margulis definitely does not reject the possibility of mutations affecting evolution, which is what you originally claimed, and which is what I pointed out was incorrect. You're missing the point, so let me provide a little history. When EvC Forum was first created, one of the problems we had was that some people liked to debate by link. One person would say, "I'm right because of http://www.sitex.com," and another person would reply, "No, you're wrong because of Home | Sitey," which I think we can agree is a pointless way of discussion. We also found that people were often posting bare links that later discussion revealed they didn't understand. And so we added rule 5 of the Forum Guidelines:

5. Bare links with no supporting discussion should be avoided. Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references.

I did extend to you the courtesy of actually looking at your Chien link, but as I said, I don't see how it supports your position. If you'd like to enter Chien's arguments into the discussion then, just as the Forum Guidelines say, you'll have to do it in your own words and use the link as a reference. I thought I already addressed this, but if not let me say it again. Scientists do not believe DNA emerged through some unlikely accident. They think it emerged gradually over millions of years from simpler predecessors through a process of imperfect replication and selection.--Percy

Your claim was hard to understand because you were vague, not esoteric. You're referencing a website with thousands of webpages. Is there any particular webpage at TalkOrigins that you meant to reference? The predecessors of Cambrian species tended to have soft body parts which are much less likely to become preserved in the fossil record. Just after the first species of a new phylum has emerged, how many species would you expect there to be in that phylum? Wouldn't you expect just one? And there wouldn't be anything unusual about that, right? Because no other number is possible, right? Continuing forward in time from the origin of this new phylum by a few million years, you still couldn't expect there to be as many species in that phylum as there would be 100 million years later. And there would be even more species in that phylum 200 million years later. And even more 300 million years later. Right?Of course, the increase in number of species across all phyla couldn't be continuous because of extinction events like the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions, but regardless your statement that "The ratio of phylum and species was unusual relative to other time periods" makes no sense. It wouldn't be the same as subsequent time periods, but that's precisely what you would expect, and there's nothing unusual about it. It's true that this is what the evidence appeared to indicate at one time. As more evidence rolled in, such as of soft-bodied ancestors in the late Precambrian and more details of the Cambrian itself, it was realized that the Cambrian explosion wasn't anywhere near as rapid as originally thought. While still a period of evolution more rapid than the pace we see today, it took more like 70 or 80 million years. As I attempted to get you to recognize in my previous email, 70 or 80 million years ago dinosaurs still roamed the earth. And as Bluejay pointed out to you, the differences between phyla in the Cambrian was much less than today. Phyla were created based on differences we see in the characteristics of creatures today. These differences were nowhere near so apparent in their ancestors of 500 million years ago, and in many cases the modern distinctions we see today did not even exist. You misunderstood. I was talking about the period not of the dinosaurs but of the period since the dinosaur extinction. And I wasn't saying anything about the rate of evolution but of the amount. 70 million years ago the largest and most sophisticated mammal was catlike, and today the most sophisticated mammal is a person and the largest is a whale, quite a huge amount of change. Compare this to the amount of change during the equally long period of the Cambrian explosion, where basically you had soft-bodied worms at the beginning, and by the end you had more complicated worms, some with hard body parts, and a larger variety of body plans. Yes, of course, and the Ediacaran period immediately preceded the Cambrian. As I said, the organisms with hard bodied parts that suddenly appeared in the Cambrian fossil record had soft-bodied Precambrian predecessors. You wrote it that way in Message 218 when describing Lynn Margulis's ideas and something you called "the complexity theory of evolution": I still don't know what the "complexity theory of evolution" is, but Lynn Margulis works within the conceptual framework of the modern synthetic theory of evolution that combines genetics with Darwin's ideas about descent with modification and natural selection. She does have strong disagreements with mainstream biologists about the degreee to which viruses and bacteria contribute mutations and influence evolution. I tend to agree with Margulis that these influences are underestimated.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.Edited by Percy, : Typo.

Your citation from TalkOrigins has nothing do to with what you claimed back in Message 250: I asked you where at TalkOrigins they said this and you now reply: Which says nothing about "a flexible genome". The word "flexible" doesn't even appear on that webpage, and your excerpt comes from a section on Haeckel's Embryos, not the Cambrian explosion. And where did you get the other nonsense about a phylum/species ratio. Neither "phyla" nor "phylum" appear on that webpage, either. How is it that you can go to a webpage whose content appears to be accurate and reasonable and draw outlandish conclusions? Ah, I see, when people disagree with you it's because they're stuck in a paradigm. This must save you a lot of trouble learning anything about what you're talking about since all you have to do is declare that someone's stuck in a paradigm and you're all done. The evidence indicates you're half right. This is untrue. It doesn't matter a great deal to this discussion whether preservation of soft body parts was common, but it wasn't. You can look this stuff up so easily that I don't understand why you're wasting everyone's time with obviously wrong information. In other words, you formed an opinion before doing any research.--Percy

While everyone has some preliminary ideas about the strength of their claims, the only way to determine their true strength is under the microscope of scientific scrutiny. We all find it frustrating when what we think are our most important points are missed or ignored, but it's a good idea to resist the impulse to assume the fault lies with others. Regarding your claims, I didn't understand some of them (and said so), and without that understanding perhaps what you thought were your important points weren't apparent.I'm sure were all sympathetic because we've all been there, but all anyone can do on any side of a debate is ask questions and give honest feedback and assessments. Does science really know this? I honestly don't know. Anyway, whether true or not, are you saying that it's too many or too few? You're again linking to an entire website instead of the specific page. Also, your link is broken because you forgot the ".org" on the end. The webpage you originally referenced was this one: And about this webpage you continue: I guess life in the "Cambrain" was pretty smart? The section you cited wasn't about the Cambrian, it was about Haeckel's embryos. This claim still makes no sense to me. How could the mere mention of Hox genes imply a recognition of "the diversity between the phylum or if there was no need for a flexible genome?" I don't know what the term "the diversity between the phylum" means, either. "Phylum" is singular, by the way. "Flexible genome" is another unfamiliar term. It seems imprecise, making it very difficult to gage what you're trying to say.About fossil preservation, I can't answer your question about how conditions in the Cambrian compare to other periods regarding how conducive they were to the preservation of soft body parts. Generally you can assume that soft body parts are much less likely to become fossilized than hard body parts.--Percy

According to the rule 5 of the Forum Guidelines you should avoid bare links and "Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references."Looking back through the thread I see that you've been reminded of rule 5 a number of times, specifically, Message 222, Message 229 and Message 245So please explain how this link supports what you've been saying about hox genes and strength of diversity and phyla/species ratios and so forth. I don't see any connection, or that your claim even makes any sense.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Clarification.

How can you say things like this and still think anyone will believe your objections aren't religious? If evolution is proven wrong it will be done through scientific investigation, not religious appeals. Adios, TraderDrew. When next you try to tackle this subject you might consider gathering your information first and drawing your conclusions second. When you start with the conclusions then you'll just keep being wrong. Incredible as it apparently must seem to religious types like yourself, making accurate statements about the real world requires studying the real world. People who understand the real world best are those who study it the most. How likely do you really think it is that those whose research interests are inclined toward God and Bible have arrived at a correct understanding of evidence from the natural world that for the most part they don't even know exists? That's why you consistently have to post things like this: You're to be lauded for your honesty, a more common reaction to being wrong is to just dig in one's heels, but what your errors hopefully tells you is that you're drawing conclusions too early in the learning process.You're not going to find any real problems with evolution at ICR or DI because they're not doing scientific research. They're doing religious apologetics. If you want to know the problems with evolution, talk to scientists. These problems are much more exciting and profound than the ones creationists make up.--Percy

Hi IchiBanThere's some intractable force that somehow inevitably leads all threads about creation and ID to instead talk about evolution, probably explaining this off-topic mutation discussion. I'm not going to discuss mutations, but I would like to address an error in your logic when you describe the request to provide evidence of something which would stop small microevolutionary steps from accumulating into large macroevolutionary changes as a request to prove a negative.It's not a request to prove a negative because you're the one who claimed that something doesn't exist (namely, macroevolutionary change). You're the one who made the negative claim. The problem with most negative claims is that they can't be proven. That's why making such claims is a form of logical fallacy. Coyote was not asking you to prove that there's no such thing as macroevolutionary change.What Coyote did do was sensibly assume that you're actually trying to make a positive claim, that there exists some mechanism that keeps evolutionary change within the boundaries of a species. It is this mechanism for which evidence was requested, and it is the opposite of a request to prove a negative.Of course, this is probably not the right thread to be discussing macroevolutionary processes, so answering Coyote would likely be off-topic, but I did want to clarify why Coyote was not asking you to prove a negative.--Percy

The wonderful charm of misconceived posts like this combine with their unfathomable ignorance to cause an indescribable dissonance in those like myself who inexplicably decide to attempt a reply. One almost doesn't know where to start. In fact, let me correct that. I'm sure I don't know where to start.First, I guess I'll say that the mammalian eye is not an evolutionary dead end. Mammals are not extinct, nor are they heading for extinction, and the mammalian eye is still free to evolve, so obviously there's no evolutionary dead end.Second, yes, the evolutionary process combined with environmental change can evolve creatures into dead ends from which there is no escape. While the term "evolutionary dead end" is usually reserved for particularly obvious or ironic examples of extinction, it's still relevant to say that extinction has happened so many millions of times that the vast majority of species that have ever existed are extinct. The theory of evolutionary explains why extinction happens.Third, you seem to think that flaws are evidence against evolution. This couldn't be further from the truth. Evolution is a tinkerer's approach, a spit and baling wire approach, almost a Rube Goldberg approach. "Good enough to work" is evolution's motto. Certainly the mammalian eye works well enough, and that's all that's required for selection.Fourth, you missed Taq's point. Taq was explaining why fixing the mammalian eye is a "You can't get there from here" type of problem. Evolution can only work with what currently exists. There is no way to gradually evolve a forward facing retina from a rearward facing one, for reasons similar to why no country that drives on the left side of the road could gradually change to driving on the right. You have to do what Burma did in the 1970's, pick a day and change all at once. Sudden large change like this is analogous to a miracle, and it's something that gradual evolution could never do.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Clarify my first point.

Sure you did. You called the mammalian eye an evolutionary dead end. It's not like there's any ambiguity, here's the entire exchange from your Message 296: For some reason or another, almost all discussions of creationism and ID end up discussing evolution, so let's get back to the thread's topic. If you really believe that the mammalian eye is flawed and an evolutionary dead end, but that it is the product of an intelligent designer, then doesn't that force you to the same conclusion as the thread's premise that the intelligent designer is inept?--Percy