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Author Topic:   What exactly is ID?
New Cat's Eye
Inactive Member


Message 1006 of 1273 (546565)
02-11-2010 3:11 PM
Reply to: Message 1003 by Brad H
02-11-2010 3:00 PM


Re: Numbers
I am sorry Percy if you think I am too simplified in my replies. I like to keep it on a level that anyone can comprehend because I know that when I reply it is to more than just to you. And you don't have to have a Ph D. to get this stuff. So it seems that the question has boiled down to "What are the odds of a positive mutation even being possible?" Before we can answer this question, we must agree on what point is it safe to actually call something "impossible?" Most people normal mean that the chances of that "something" happening are so small that they are very improbable. And I do admit that just what constitutes impossible depends on who is doing the judging. Someone mentioned winning the lottery earlier, I’ll bet that if a person won the state lottery two weeks straight in a row, which is about a chance of one in a hundred trillion, the judges would think that that was pretty impossible. I’m sure they wouldn’t pay on the second win and they would probably investigate the first one with a fine tooth comb. Or if a person were to toss 150 quarters in the air, they should expect that only once in 10 to the 45th power tosses, that the coins would all come up heads. To put this into perspective of just how big that number is, lets imagine how long it would take to toss 150 coins that many times. Since flipping coins, counting all the heads, and then picking them all back up, can be very slow and time consuming, lets imagine we employed 1,000 super fast people to all help us toss coins. If each person could do the entire process once per second, and we allowed them to do this for one hundred years they still could only flip the coins about three trillion times, which is a long way away from 10 to the 45th power. So suppose you searched for a much faster way to flip coins and so what you did was you programmed a computer to simulate the tossing of 150 coins and it could do it in a "trillionth" of a second, and then you enlisted a billion of these simulators and all together you call them one "pod." Then from there you proceeded to use ten billion of these "pods" and you let them all run at that speed for 3000 years. Even in all of that time you would still only have flipped the quarters 10 to the 42 power times. My point in all of this should be obvious, that since no sane person would ever expect to get all 150 coins to land on heads. I believe anyone in there right mind would consider doing so to be basically "impossible." Therefore, I hope that we are safe to agree that the odds of 10 to the 45 th to one are basically impossible.
So lets for now completely ignore the impossible odds of life forming from non-life. Lets forgo the concept where a single cell must develop all at once and fully capable of reproducing. And we will also ignore the fact that this had to occur from completely random processes from out of nonliving matter (meaning that natural selective processes don’t apply). We for now will just look at the possibility for the development of information to take place in the "already existing" DNA of a genome. What are the odds? Evolution has to explain how all the information in the DNA of plants and animals got into the genome to begin with. Evolution theory says that all life of today was built up through a gradual build up of steps of this information. Each step adding a small amount of information to the genome and in each step, selection has to test if the mutation is positive or not, and destroy the negative ones. You might look at mutations in the nucleotides of DNA like a writer making random changes in the letters of a book. Imagine if the writer of a novel were trying to improve his novel by changing letters at random. The writer would change a few random letters and then (keeping with reproduction processes) he reprints his book at least twice, once with the changes and once with the original. He would then check to see if he liked the changes and throw it away if he didn’t. He could not just keep the changes he liked; he would have to keep the entire text with all the random changes or throw it all away and stay with the original. It would be all or nothing. The random changes in the letters of the book corresponds with the random mutations said to occur in the DNA message of an organism, and the reprinting of the two copies corresponds with organisms ability to reproduce. The choice to keep one over the other corresponds with natural selection. Right about here, evolution proponents usually try to argue that the writer should be able to just hold on to those changes he likes and carry them on while disposing of the ones he doesn't like. However catch what they just did. They just unwittingly smuggled "intelligence" into the mix. For nature to "hold on to the changes it likes" and dispose of the ones it does not, implies that nature has a plan. But now evolutionists are adamant that the whole mutation process is completely random with no plan behind it. If nature has a plan then nature must have intelligence, and now we are talking about "intelligent design." No, the writer must keep all changes made to his novel at random (good and bad) or he must toss the whole thing out and stick with the original. This would dictate that he keep his changes to a bare minimum. Any random changes much more than one letter would have a much higher chance of rendering a negative change which would require destroying it and restarting. But then, even with the improvements there would be likely a problem that would cause him to reject it anyway. For example randomly changing a letter in one word might actually change that word into a new and improved word but perhaps now that word doesn’t make sense in the sentence or in the paragraph. Or it may not make sense in the reading of the book. If the book was about three mice, and the first letter of mice was changed to d to make dice, most of the other sentences with the word mice would need changing. And even if you could somehow change all the mice words to dice, you still would probably render the entire book to be unintelligible. This objection of course has been raised in the past and its a very valid one. To get an improvement you have to have several correlated changes all taking place at the same time and in just the right places. In other words you have to have much more than 150 coins all land on their heads at once in each and every step of the process of evolution. I haven’t calculated it, but obviously if you do, the odds of these correlated changes occurring all at once far surpasses our "impossible" number.
AAaarg! It burns my eyes!
Chop that shit up with some paragraphs, man!
Seriously, those big huge chuncks of text are harder to read. I bet a lot of people (like myself) are just going to pass over it for that reason.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1003 by Brad H, posted 02-11-2010 3:00 PM Brad H has not replied

Taq
Member
Posts: 10302
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 7.1


Message 1007 of 1273 (546568)
02-11-2010 3:20 PM
Reply to: Message 1005 by Brad H
02-11-2010 3:00 PM


Re: addition, subtraction, addition, subtraction, where does it end?
Systems containing csi have only been observed being produced by intelligent sources (i.e. human).
You are assuming the antecedent. This is a logical fallacy:
All X are Y
Y, therefore X.
We can use an example. All priests are catholic. Mary is a catholic, therefore she is a priest. This is the same mistake you are committing.
So if an ID proponent uses "present is the key to the past" ideology, it is considered a fallacy, but when an evolutionist does it its considered good science?
When has an ID proponent observed this supposed designer producing new life in the present?
Those figures are just given to give us an idea of the impossible odds the formation of first life must overcome.
As I have shown, they don't give us an idea. They are merely biased assumptions dressed up in math.
The fact of the matter is that present simple single celled organisms, such as heterotrophs, are considered by many evolutionary scientists to be the likely first life forms.
Organisms that are the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution are not considered to be representative of the first life. That is just ridiculous. Sorry, but you have taken a long walk off a short pier with this one. Some are hypothesizing that the first life didn't have proteins at all.
Yes this would be a huge problem if we had no way to peer into the box and examine its contents to see if the other tiles also had the number 42 on them.
And this is exactly the problem here. We don't know how many combinations of chemicals will result in life. We don't know what the simplest replicator possible is. We don't know a lot, and yet you want to spit out probabilities based on this ignorance. Sorry, but it doesn't compute.
The oldest claimed fossils are stromatolites 3.5 billion years old, formed by blue green algae very similar to what we observe today.
We have no idea how similar those organisms were to modern life. None at all, other than they were single celled organisms that produced specific geologic structures. That's it. Again, you are jumping to conclusions based on very shaky assumptions.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1005 by Brad H, posted 02-11-2010 3:00 PM Brad H has not replied

Taq
Member
Posts: 10302
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 7.1


Message 1008 of 1273 (546570)
02-11-2010 3:25 PM
Reply to: Message 1002 by Brad H
02-11-2010 3:00 PM


Re: A practical application of ID
No problem my friend. First I want to point out that your example starts and ends with in the "primate" family. Next I want you to know that I have seen this very picture many times. Thank you for being the first to point out that "A" is a modern chimp. Every one before you, that I have encountered, have tried to obscure that little bit of information which sent up the red flags right off the bat. Also I noticed that your link did . . . [clipped for brevity]
You will notice that you never attempted to answer the question.
"How does ID explain the progression seen in these images if it is not by new additions or changes in the genome?"
You were asked about ID, not evolution. So why did you write such a large post about evolution? What is the ID explanation for this series, and what experiments can we run to test this explanation?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1002 by Brad H, posted 02-11-2010 3:00 PM Brad H has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1014 by Brad H, posted 02-12-2010 11:39 AM Taq has replied

Coyote
Member (Idle past 2365 days)
Posts: 6117
Joined: 01-12-2008


Message 1009 of 1273 (546575)
02-11-2010 4:14 PM
Reply to: Message 1002 by Brad H
02-11-2010 3:00 PM


Re: A practical application of ID
If the above mentioned cases don't completely destroy the parade of skulls touted as human evolution, in your mind, they should at least give cause for extreme doubt. They make for a really neat slide show, but they do not present evidence of evolution of man. If the paleontologists themselves can not be sure what they are looking at, how can we laymen? Therefore they do nothing in the way of helping in our current discussion about added genetic information. That's because as British paleontologist and senior editor of the scientific journal Nature, Henry Gee said, "To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story- amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."
Can't ID exist without reference to evolution?
When I posted those pictures to you I asked for "A practical application of ID" not a flawed critique of evolution. I am still waiting for your explanation, using ID "theory," of those various specimens and how they relate to one another.
(And don't bother to try and tell me what those various skulls are and what they mean. Half of my graduate work was in the fields of fossil man and human osteology. I have handled and studied casts of most of those.)

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1002 by Brad H, posted 02-11-2010 3:00 PM Brad H has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1015 by Brad H, posted 02-12-2010 11:39 AM Coyote has replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1664 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 1010 of 1273 (546590)
02-11-2010 8:25 PM
Reply to: Message 1003 by Brad H
02-11-2010 3:00 PM


age information here
Hi Brad H, still slugging away eh?
Now if you care to direct this conversation to the nearest "Age of the Earth" discussion, I'll be happy to continue it.
See Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 for starters. Note that the issue is not just the various methods for counting the miimum ages by various means, but the correlations between them.
See you there?
Enjoy.

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.


• • • Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click) • • •

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1003 by Brad H, posted 02-11-2010 3:00 PM Brad H has not replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1664 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 1011 of 1273 (546592)
02-11-2010 9:15 PM
Reply to: Message 1004 by Brad H
02-11-2010 3:00 PM


Re: the walkingstick problem - either "information" increases or it is irrelevant
Hi Brad H, thanks,
The beetle example I gave explains just fine how an organism can go from flier, to nonflying, back to flier, merely by manipulating the code that already exists within the gene pool.
And you previously agreed that this does not apply to traits fixed by speciation events as shown on the diagram.
Also the walking stick fossil record (like all of the fossil record) is only evidence of a certain species existence.
You are still not paying attention. First, this does not use any fossil evidence, as the evidence is genetic, and second, the diagram includes 39 living species in the order Phasmatodea, and this includes several genera and family groups within the order.
This is not comparable to your beetle species, which only lost wings.
Message 809: See Figure 1 from Nature 421, 264 - 267 (16 January 2003); doi:10.1038/nature01313 (reproduced below)
Walkingstick insects originally started out as winged insects (blue at start and top row). That diversified.
And some lost wings (red). And diversified.
And some regained wings (blue again). And diversified.
And one lost wings again (Lapaphus parakensis, below, red again).

Can you explain how this occurs when information is only lost?
Wings
No wings
Wings
No wings
All by loss of information?
You have not explained this yet in any way that can account for what is shown in the diagram.
All presumed relationships and ages are merely just that...presumptions.
And once again I direct you to see Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1, as I have several times already (including one most recently in Message 1010 in answer to your request. It is rather dishonest in my opinion to keep making comments like this and not dealing with the age issue first.
You are referring to your graph as if it is iron clad. Yet you have no basis for such an assumption. Unless the entomologists conclusions of species relational branching were actually observed and documented, they have no evidence that they are in fact related or in which order they are related.
Again, the diagram is a cladogram based on genetic analysis. Here is the abstract for the article again:
Loss and recovery of wings in stick insects | Nature
quote:
Loss and recovery of wings in stick insects
Michael F. Whiting, Sven Bradler & Taylor Maxwell
Nature 421, 264-267 (16 January 2003) | doi:10.1038/nature01313; Received 29 May 2002; Accepted 31 October 2002
... Here we show that stick insects (order Phasmatodea) diversified as wingless insects and that wings were derived secondarily, perhaps on many occasions. These results suggest that wing developmental pathways are conserved in wingless phasmids, and that 're-evolution' of wings has had an unrecognized role in insect diversification.
Please also note what I said in Message 867 about reversing mutations:
In Message 825 I asked you whether 123456789 and 1213456789 have the same information, and you blanked. The problem for you is threefold:
  1. that the additional number is indeed an increase in information, in the normal information theory meaning, thus any point insertion is indeed an increase of information,
  2. that a second mutation can remove the addition, thereby reverting to the original condition, and one or the other of these mutations necessarily violates your "no increase in information" position,
  3. finally, when we talk about DNA rather than just numbers, we can have a section of DNA that codes for a protein being interrupted by this insertion, changing the protein output.
So if we see an on again off again situation, where you are not dealing with the change in the proportions of existing alleles in a population (as in the peppered moths), then you have the situation #2 above.
This is the condition we see with the walkingsticks: there are a few species where the female is wingless and the male has wings, but none of the remaining species in the diagram have a mixture of some with wings and some without wings in their populations.
Message 809 We can calculate the effect of such information on evolution as follows:
  1. Wings
  2. No wings = (a) + informationa = Wings + informationa
    IF going from (a) to (b) involves a loss of information then informationa is positive
  3. Wings = (b) + informationb = No wings + informationb = (a) + informationa + informationb = Wings + informationa + informationb
    IF going from (b) to (c) involves a loss of information then informationb is positive
Wings - Wings = informationa + informationb = 0
informationa + informationb = 0
informationa = 0 - informationb
Either information is gained in one case, or the information content that affects evolution ≡ 0
Obviously if information is always lost, that then this concept of information has no effect on what can and cannot evolve.
Comments in yellow added for emphasis.
So far you have not convinced me that "information" as you define it - something that is always lost - is worth consideration as any critique of what can or cannot evolve.
Enjoy.
Edited by RAZD, : .

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.


• • • Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click) • • •

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1004 by Brad H, posted 02-11-2010 3:00 PM Brad H has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1016 by Brad H, posted 02-12-2010 11:39 AM RAZD has replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22954
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 6.9


Message 1012 of 1273 (546620)
02-12-2010 7:28 AM
Reply to: Message 1003 by Brad H
02-11-2010 3:00 PM


Re: Numbers
Brad H writes:
Only if you are going to count single celled A sexual bacteria which bear little to nothing in common with the rest of the living world around us...
Boy, when you decide to be wrong you really do it in style. First, it's "asexual", not "A sexual". Second, there are far more bacterial cells in the human body than human cells, especially in the human gut, and without them you couldn't digest your food, so they have a great deal to do with us. Third, bacterial cells use the same DNA structure, nucleotides and amino acids as all other cell types on the planet.
So much for your "little to nothing in common with the rest of the living world."
Anyway, what you're saying here is that you agree that bacteria have been demonstrated to experience positive mutations, but that what we find true for bacteria doesn't necessarily hold true for other types of cells. I'd ask why you think this is true, except I know you're just making things up as you go along. If that's not true then why don't you surprise us and finally support something you say with actual evidence.
Well...I know I will get called on the carpet by the administrator if I respond to that off topic comment too much. So let me just say that you have stated a presumption (as fact) that I can easily throw a big wrench into. Now if you care to direct this conversation to the nearest "Age of the Earth" discussion, I'll be happy to continue it.
This thread is about defining ID. Does ID believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old? If so, then of course it's on topic. It sounds to me like you're confusing ID and young Earth creationism, but if you want to claim that ID believes the Earth is young then go ahead. Why break your streak of wrong statements now? By the way, Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, a founding member of the ID movement, and one of ID's most prominent proponents, believes the Earth is billions of years old.
I am sorry Percy if you think I am too simplified in my replies
Don't apologize for not making things more complicated than they need to be. There are already too many people writing long essays. My criticism wasn't that you had insufficient detail but insufficient evidence. I understand what you believe perfectly, but there seems to be no factual underpinning for your beliefs, or at least none that you're sharing with us.
In contrast to the way your post opened, the remainder was a sincere and largely successful effort on your part to clearly communicate your understanding of one of the primary problems with evolution, so I'm going to address that now.
It is clear that you understand that each offspring represents an experiment, and so all around the Earth there are literally (if we include bacteria) billions and trillions of experiments daily. The offspring go off to make their way in the world, each with its own mix of alleles (sexual reproduction) and mutations, and each is able to produce its own offspring proportionate to its ability to compete successfully in its environment for such things as food and, with sexual reproduction, access to mates.
Where you go wrong is in believing that the impact of the environment on life represents a plan. Nature has no plan. If the environment turns colder then life with characteristics more suitable to the cold will out-reproduce life that does not possess such characteristics. Life with better cold adaptations will replace life that doesn't have such adaptations. Mutations and allele combinations that favor survival in the cold will become more common. The genome of populations in this colder world will become different from before the environmental change.
About your coin flipping analogy, notice that at no point in the evolutionary process is there anything unlikely going on. Your coin flipping analogy has nothing to do with evolution. In each generation the better adapted contribute more successfully to the next generation than those less well adapted, and so the genes of the better adapted will always be better represented in a population. As environments warm and cool and dry and hydrate and change elevation (even to below sea level) population genomes are forced to accommodate or go extinct.
I suppose one could euphemistically say that nature, in your words, "holds on to the changes it likes," but the impersonal impact of environment on life is not a plan. Where you went wrong was in taking a characteristic of your analogy and assuming that it is possessed by nature. The writer of your novel provides the selection mechanism in your analogy, and the writer uses his intelligence in making his selections. You're drawing an analogy between the selection performed by the intelligent writer and selection in nature, and then you're concluding that because the writer is intelligent that nature must also be intelligent.
What you're doing is overextending your analogy. As an illustration of selection it works fine, but just because the type of selection performed by the writer requires intelligence doesn't mean that the type of selection performed by nature requires intelligence. That the mechanism of selection in your analogy has intelligence was a choice you made when you composed your analogy and has nothing to do with nature. If the writer decided to select for changes that were more representative of conservative political beliefs would that mean nature is also conservative? No, of course not, it's irrelevant.
To get an improvement you have to have several correlated changes all taking place at the same time and in just the right places. In other words you have to have much more than 150 coins all land on their heads at once in each and every step of the process of evolution.
If you wanted a gerbil to give birth to a kangaroo then I agree it would be as unlikely as you say, but that's not the way evolution works. Evolution is the accumulation of tiny, minute changes over generations, so sudden changes of this magnitude in a single generation simply do not happen.
I know your writer analogy of single letter changes convinces you that tiny changes cannot accumulate into positive changes, but think about it for a while and you realize that in nature nothing else could possibly happen. Changes toward worse adaptation will be less likely to make it to the next generation. While presenting your writer analogy you seem to have forgotten your earlier acknowledgement that there are actually millions and billions of writers selecting from single letter changes in their books, and that only the better "adapted" books in each generation go forward to contribute to the next generation.
AbE: I guess I should make an effort to more directly address the topic. This thread isn't about evolution. It's about how IDists define ID. How does ID explain the fossil record of change over time?
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Add closing attempt to get on topic.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1003 by Brad H, posted 02-11-2010 3:00 PM Brad H has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1013 by Coyote, posted 02-12-2010 11:07 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied
 Message 1017 by Brad H, posted 02-12-2010 11:40 AM Percy has replied
 Message 1018 by Brad H, posted 02-12-2010 11:40 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied

Coyote
Member (Idle past 2365 days)
Posts: 6117
Joined: 01-12-2008


Message 1013 of 1273 (546638)
02-12-2010 11:07 AM
Reply to: Message 1012 by Percy
02-12-2010 7:28 AM


ID and the fossil record
How does ID explain the fossil record of change over time?
It apparently doesn't.
I posted that well known picture of hominid fossil skulls, asking for an explanation based on ID "theory" and all I got in return was a diatribe on how evolution is wrong.
I'm still waiting for ID's explanation of the change over time that is shown in that photograph.

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1012 by Percy, posted 02-12-2010 7:28 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied

Brad H
Member (Idle past 5213 days)
Posts: 81
Joined: 01-05-2010


Message 1014 of 1273 (546643)
02-12-2010 11:39 AM
Reply to: Message 1008 by Taq
02-11-2010 3:25 PM


Re: A practical application of ID
We can use an example. All priests are catholic. Mary is a catholic, therefore she is a priest. This is the same mistake you are committing.
No I don’t think so at all. Keeping with your crude analogy, if we looked into a room full of what we knew were nothing but Catholics and we could see back as far as 3 quarters of the way into the room and observed nothing but priests, then it would not be a stretch to conclude the room was probably full of nothing but Catholic priests. We observe all life today, down to the simplest single celled organism to be very complex systems with specific DNA coding arranged relaying information needed to replicate. We can see back in time, through the fossil record, over 3 quarters of the way into the box and see that those systems were just as complex. So it is no stretch to conclude that the first living cells were not much less complicated than they are now. But besides all of that, if it were so easy to form a basic model from non living material, then why can’t our smartest scientists even replicate it under controlled conditions, let alone observe it occurring naturally anywhere?
Brad: So if an ID proponent uses "present is the key to the past" ideology, it is considered a fallacy, but when an evolutionist does it its considered good science?
Taq: When has an ID proponent observed this supposed designer producing new life in the present?
That wasn’t the point I was making and you know it. In context I was referring to the fact that present heterotrophs (considered to be probably the first life forms) are very complex and likely so were also the very first ones. But when us "IDers" make such conclusions based on present observations, you call it a fallacy. However you probably have no problem with evolutionists who use present conditions and observations to conclude how events were shaped in the past, as long as it agrees with your ABG agenda.
But lets go a head and look at my comment above, out of context (in the way that you have twisted it). Even in your implied context (not mine), with that logic, why don't you expect SETI scientists to have ever encountered extra terrestrials who can produce simple strings of prime numbers before they conclude that (if they detect prime numbers being transmitted from deep space) that it had an intelligent source? That was just a rhetorical question, we both know why. The fact is ID proponents do not need to have ever observed a designer producing a life form with csi to recognize that a designer is required in order to produce csi. In fact, quite the opposite, we are amazed at people who think that we do.
Some are hypothesizing that the first life didn't have proteins at all.
Isn't that just a fancy way of saying they are using their imaginations? What's really awesome is that that takes much more faith to believe, than ID requires.
Brad: The oldest claimed fossils are stromatolites 3.5 billion years old, formed by blue green algae very similar to what we observe today.
Taq: We have no idea how similar those organisms were to modern life. None at all, other than they were single celled organisms that produced specific geologic structures. That's it. Again, you are jumping to conclusions based on very shaky assumptions.
Except for the fact that the ones today leave the same "finger prints" so to speak as those did. Or did you forget all about the big "Mars rock" controversy and why some thought it was evidence for life on Mars? Meaning-- "If it quacks like a duck..."
You were asked about ID, not evolution. So why did you write such a large post about evolution? What is the ID explanation for this series, and what experiments can we run to test this explanation?
The explanation is just as I explained. That being, if the series is NOT evidence of human progression as touted, then ID has no need to "explain" anything concerning alleged additions of genetic material. Basically all we are looking at are a bunch of skulls of different creatures. Some may have been different variations of chimps along with their disfigured. And others are variations of humans along with their disfigured. Just because someone lined them all in a row and claimed they are all part of some evolutionary related succession, does not mean it is true. Or did you just completely ignor the words of Dr. Lyall Watson and Henry Gee?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1008 by Taq, posted 02-11-2010 3:25 PM Taq has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1021 by Taq, posted 02-12-2010 2:45 PM Brad H has not replied
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Brad H
Member (Idle past 5213 days)
Posts: 81
Joined: 01-05-2010


Message 1015 of 1273 (546644)
02-12-2010 11:39 AM
Reply to: Message 1009 by Coyote
02-11-2010 4:14 PM


Re: A practical application of ID
When I posted those pictures to you I asked for "A practical application of ID" not a flawed critique of evolution.
No that's not what you did Coyote. You presented an evolutionary model of supposed human development and expected an ID explanation for the genetic changes in that development. It's like the grade school bully asking a kid if his mom knows he's so stupid? The question already implies the kids stupidity to be a fact and then only asks if his mother is aware of this fact. It requires only a yes or no answer and therefore the kid is made to look stupid regardless of which of the two he responds with. All I did was point out that the question was invalid. If the succession of skulls are NOT evidence for evolutionary development of humans, then no explanation for the genetic changes are required on the part of ID.
Half of my graduate work was in the fields of fossil man and human osteology. I have handled and studied casts of most of those.
Well great. Then you know first hand what I am talking about.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1009 by Coyote, posted 02-11-2010 4:14 PM Coyote has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1019 by Coyote, posted 02-12-2010 12:21 PM Brad H has replied

Brad H
Member (Idle past 5213 days)
Posts: 81
Joined: 01-05-2010


Message 1016 of 1273 (546645)
02-12-2010 11:39 AM
Reply to: Message 1011 by RAZD
02-11-2010 9:15 PM


Re: the walkingstick problem - either "information" increases or it is irrelevant
See Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 for starters. Note that the issue is not just the various methods for counting the miimum ages by various means, but the correlations between them.
Thanks Razd. I'll check it out. I'll wait to see your post there addressed to me and then I will respond.
First, this does not use any fossil evidence, as the evidence is genetic, and second, the diagram includes 39 living species in the order Phasmatodea, and this includes several genera and family groups within the order.
Ok, that was what I previously explained to you that I was unclear on. I recall asking for a link to a specific paper in which I could read the experiment being conducted with the insects and the observed genetic changes within the generations. In order to conclude addition of NEW information to the genome, such observations should have been made in the same manor as the E. coli bacteria. I don't believe you ever linked me to such a paper, your first link just sent me to a table of contents and the next was only to an abstract. Neither are any help to me and I just assumed (shame on me) that these were examples of extinct or past walking sticks. I also assumed they were based on fossils. I myself know nothing about walking sticks. But I am a very quick learner, I just need a complete paper to look at.
This is not comparable to your beetle species, which only lost wings.
I don't see an explanation as to why the two would not be comparable. Please note that just saying its not, doesn't help me understand why?
You have not explained this yet in any way that can account for what is shown in the diagram.
I think at this point Razd, it would be better if I just hold off on commenting any further on your diagram, until you have provided me with a link that better explains exactly how its conclusions were constructed.
And once again I direct you to see Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1, as I have several times already (including one most recently in Message 1010 in answer to your request. It is rather dishonest in my opinion to keep making comments like this and not dealing with the age issue first.
But Razd, I am only just now in this message responding to message 1010. So isn't it just a little bit unfair for you to call me dishonest? I said (in this message) that I was waiting for you to address me on that other site, and you haven't yet, so are you being dishonest? Why haven't you done so? ) As for me going to various "suggested" sites, when I am already locked into one discussion, I will only do so when someone from the site I am on addresses a message directly to me on that other site. I typically avoid having "too many irons in the fire."
In Message 825 I asked you whether 123456789 and 1213456789 have the same information, and you blanked.
My bad. I missed that some how. But the answer is "no" they do not have the exact same information potential. And yes it is an increase in information. But is it "new" information or just repeated, and does the outcome cause a benefit? Look at it this way. We know the code that tells the pointer of our computer to move left with the motion of the mouse, or right, or up, or down, is complex specified information. In basic computer language it would look something similar to this: IF INPUT X ="-->" THEN Y = Y+1 ELSE NEXT This tells the computer to add 1 to the "Y" pointer position when it receives that right movement signal input from the mouse. That's just one small line in hundreds of thousands of lines of code in a program. If virus program were designed that added a second line which read IF INPUT X ="-->" THEN Y = 1 ELSE NEXT, then the computer would first read the correct line and for an instant function correctly but then the second line would tell it to place the pointer in the Y = 1 position. That would mean every time you moved the mouse to the right then the pointer would instantly relocate to the top of the screen.
A very annoying virus. But suppose the virus (during replication to another computer) accidentally received an addition of information so that it read: IF INPUT X ="-->" THEN NEXT Y = 1 ELSE NEXT. Here the word next got borrowed from the end of the line and copied into the middle of the line. The new "mutated" line still actually achieves a positive effect in the entire program. Now when the mouse is moved right it will first read the original line which tells it to perform the original function, and when it gets to the next "virus" line it will read the movement of the mouse and do nothing at all but skip on to the next line. We could say that this is an addition of information that improved the program, but it is not "new" information, it is just a copied and repeated word. But the big picture here is that none of this explains how the complex specified information of the entire program could have formed to begin with.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1011 by RAZD, posted 02-11-2010 9:15 PM RAZD has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1035 by RAZD, posted 02-13-2010 3:40 PM Brad H has replied

Brad H
Member (Idle past 5213 days)
Posts: 81
Joined: 01-05-2010


Message 1017 of 1273 (546646)
02-12-2010 11:40 AM
Reply to: Message 1012 by Percy
02-12-2010 7:28 AM


Re: Numbers
First, it's "asexual", not "A sexual". Second, there are far more bacterial cells in the human body than human cells, especially in the human gut, and without them you couldn't digest your food, so they have a great deal to do with us. Third, bacterial cells use the same DNA structure, nucleotides and amino acids as all other cell types on the planet.
"First" so sue me for not typing exactly perfect what I am thinking all the time. "Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone." "Second" I was clearly contrasting single celled prokaryotes and multi celled eukaryotes, not just the "sheer numbers" of the organisms. "Thirdly" I think micro biologists would mostly all agree with me that bacteria are very dissimilar to eukaryotes. One of the biggies is that the genetic material is not membrane bound. And lets not forget the plasmids which mostly only exist in bacteria. So how is that for being wrong with "style?" Perhaps the only thing wrong here is your attempt to make me look foolish. I'll pause here while you wipe that egg (that backfired) off your face...
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get it all?
OK lets continue...

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1012 by Percy, posted 02-12-2010 7:28 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1020 by Percy, posted 02-12-2010 1:41 PM Brad H has replied
 Message 1023 by Taq, posted 02-12-2010 3:04 PM Brad H has replied

Brad H
Member (Idle past 5213 days)
Posts: 81
Joined: 01-05-2010


Message 1018 of 1273 (546647)
02-12-2010 11:40 AM
Reply to: Message 1012 by Percy
02-12-2010 7:28 AM


Re: Numbers
I know you're just making things up as you go along. If that's not true then why don't you surprise us and finally support something you say with actual evidence.
I'll be the first to admit that much of my arguments utilize common knowledge science and logic, but your insinuation that I don't back anything I say is easily proven false. For example two of my recent messages provided backing sources. Or did you miss those? see 1002, 1005
Percy: Life has existed on Earth for at least 3 billion years. That would require adding only a single base/pair per year. Doesn't sound so impossible now, does it?
Brad: ...let me just say that you have stated a presumption (as fact) that I can easily throw a big wrench into.
Percy: This thread is about defining ID. Does ID believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old? If so, then of course it's on topic. It sounds to me like you're confusing ID and young Earth creationism, but if you want to claim that ID believes the Earth is young then go ahead. Why break your streak of wrong statements now? By the way, Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, a founding member of the ID movement, and one of ID's most prominent proponents, believes the Earth is billions of years old.
Of course ID has nothing to do with the age of the Earth. Your comment only exposes your bare back side. As you can see above in the course of our discussion you brought it up (when it had nothing to do with ID) and all I did was say I think I can discredit the notion... and I left it at that. But you could not even gracefully just say ok lets take it up on thread "XXXX." Another poster on this thread however, had the grace to do that and he was not even part of our conversation.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1012 by Percy, posted 02-12-2010 7:28 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied

Coyote
Member (Idle past 2365 days)
Posts: 6117
Joined: 01-12-2008


Message 1019 of 1273 (546652)
02-12-2010 12:21 PM
Reply to: Message 1015 by Brad H
02-12-2010 11:39 AM


Re: A practical application of ID
If the succession of skulls are NOT evidence for evolutionary development of humans, then no explanation for the genetic changes are required on the part of ID.
So what you are saying is that there was no change from one to the next?
It sounds like you are saying that each skull represents a created kind.
If so, that is not an ID explanation. That is a biblical explanation.
Don't you have an ID explanation?

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1015 by Brad H, posted 02-12-2010 11:39 AM Brad H has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1058 by Brad H, posted 02-21-2010 4:54 AM Coyote has replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22954
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 6.9


Message 1020 of 1273 (546653)
02-12-2010 1:41 PM
Reply to: Message 1017 by Brad H
02-12-2010 11:40 AM


Re: Numbers
Hi Brad,
I'm not trying to make you look foolish. You don't need my help in doing that. I've only been pointing out where you're wrong, perhaps in increasingly ostentatious fashion as it's become apparent that you don't care much about getting things right.
In this case you said that bacteria "bear little to nothing in common with the rest of the living world around us." That's wrong. Dead wrong. Replying with a message that manages to make a few correct statements doesn't make your error correct.
I'll be the first to admit that much of my arguments utilize common knowledge science and logic, but your insinuation that I don't back anything I say is easily proven false. For example two of my recent messages provided backing sources. Or did you miss those? see 1002, 1005
Congratulations, but those messages weren't addressed to me. Your replies to me have been remarkably evidence free.
Of course ID has nothing to do with the age of the Earth.
I don't want to discuss the age of the Earth. You said that "there would need to be a whole lot of adding of info taking place in evolution to go from a single celled organism to multi-celled complex organisms that can build condominiums." What this is saying that ID believes there's too much information in our genome for it to have happened naturally.
So I replied that if it took 3 billion years to add all that info then that's a very tiny rate of adding information, one base pair per year, and you responded about the age of the Earth. So is that why ID thinks there's too much information in our genome to have occurred naturally, because the Earth is too young and there wasn't enough time?
It's not, is it.
So let's skip the part where you try to explain how what you said made perfect sense in an ID context. Let's instead just go to the part where you explain why ID believes there's too much information in our genome for it to have occurred naturally.
You didn't comment on the other portions of my reply. Do you now understand what was wrong with your coin flip and writer analogies?
And again trying to bring this discussion back to the topic, what is the ID explanation for the evidence we have of life's history on earth, such as the genetic and fossil records? How does ID think this all happened? What does this evidence tell us about the design principles that the designer employed? What can we ferret out about the mechanisms the designer employed to modify genomes? Did the designer introduce change and innovation at species level, or at the genus level, or at a higher level, or did it vary? Why did the designer create in a nested hierarchy? What are the ID answers to these questions? In other words, what is ID?
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1017 by Brad H, posted 02-12-2010 11:40 AM Brad H has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1059 by Brad H, posted 02-21-2010 4:54 AM Percy has replied

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