What exactly is ID?

All X are Y.Y.Therefore X.That is a logical fallacy no matter how it is dressed up with rhetoric. You are committing this fallacy. There is no two ways about it. You argument can also be shown to beg the question. This is where the conclusion is found in the premise.All known complexity is due to intelligent design.Life is complex.Therefore, life is designed.The conclusion and first premise are the same. There are about 6 billion different DNA combinations living right now that produce a human. 6 billion. That's not specific at all. Add to that the billions of species that have lived through time. There is no specificity. There is what works and what doesn't.Secondly, show me a 2 billion year old genome. If you can't do it then withdraw your claim. What we do observe is that genomes change in every generation. Therefore, there is no expectation whatsoever that genomes were the same 3.5 billion years ago. None. That's not what SETI is looking for. SETI is looking for a narrowband radiowave signal. That's it. They are looking for a radio transmitter within the clutter of broadband radio signals produced by stars and celestial objects. They are not looking for strings of prime numbers. They don't need any observations since it is a dogmatic religious belief.IDer's have not even been able to evidence CSI in real life genomes, so you seem to be jumping the gun a bit. Those fingerprints do not indicate the DNA sequence of their genome nor their intracellular organization. As for Mars, do you really think that if they do find stromatolite-like deposits on Mars that they will conclude that organisms with DNA identical to modern Earth algae produced those deposits?

There was no ID explanation, just a long diatribe against evolution. Where was this progression indicated? Here is the picture again: Do you see anywhere in there that says "THIS IS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESSION"? I don't see it. These skulls are laid out in CHRONOLOGICAL order (except for the chimp skull in A).So you need to explain, using ID, why older fossils look more like chimps and more recent skulls look more like humans. How does ID explain this? Remember, "not evolution" is not an ID explanation. We want to know how it DID happen according to ID and the experiments we can do to test this explanation. How do you determine, using ID, which are disfigured and which are not? If I found a dog skull is it doubly disfigured because it isn't identical to either a chimp skull or a human skull? How do you distinguish which are separate species and which are not using the fossil data? How do you use ID to determine this? Did you? Let's take Henry Gee's words. These fossils do not come with birth certificates so how did you determine who was related to whom?And just so you know:

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The Discovery Institute’s Viewers Guide to the PBS Evolution series claims in several places (for example, on page 11) that the series leave(s) viewers with the misleading impression that the evidence for human evolution is much stronger than it really is. The Guide attempts to discredit the scientific implications of the human fossil record by quoting (on pages 11, 40, 47, 88, and 111) passages from the 1999 book In Search of Deep Time by Dr. Henry Gee, who is also Senior Editor, Biological Sciences, for the journal Nature. Dr. Gee has sent us the following comments:
1. The Discovery Institute has used unauthorized, selective quotations from my book IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME to support their outdated, mistaken views.
2. Darwinian evolution by natural selection is taken as a given in IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME, and this is made clear several times e.g. on p5 (paperback edition) I write that "if it is fair to assume that all life on Earth shares a common evolutionary origin..." and then go on to make clear that this is the assumption I am making throughout the book. For the Discovery Institute to quote from my book without reference to this is mischievous.
3. That it is impossible to trace direct lineages of ancestry and descent from the fossil record should be self-evident. Ancestors must exist, of course -- but we can never attribute ancestry to any particular fossil we might find. Just try this thought experiment -- let's say you find a fossil of a hominid, an ancient member of the human family. You can recognize various attributes that suggest kinship to humanity, but you would never know whether this particular fossil represented your lineal ancestor - even if that were actually the case. The reason is that fossils are never buried with their birth certificates. Again, this is a logical constraint that must apply even if evolution were true -- which is not in doubt, because if we didn't have ancestors, then we wouldn't be here. Neither does this mean that fossils exhibiting transitional structures do not exist, nor that it is impossible to reconstruct what happened in evolution. Unfortunately, many paleontologists believe that ancestor/descendent lineages can be traced from the fossil record, and my book is intended to debunk this view. However, this disagreement is hardly evidence of some great scientific coverup -- religious fundamentalists such as the DI -- who live by dictatorial fiat -- fail to understand that scientific disagreement is a mark of health rather than decay. However, the point of IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME, ironically, is that old-style, traditional evolutionary biology

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Since I am a microbiologist I will comment. Yes, eukaryotes and prokaryotes are very dissimilar, but not completely so. They also share basic, fundamental genetic systems such as ribosomes, tRNA's, and codon usage. Codon usage is the big one. There is no physical law that requires the DNA codon ATG to result in a methionine residue in a protein. NONE AT ALL. The relationship between codon and amino acid is arbitrary. To the microbiologist this is a huge clue, a clue that indicates shared ancestry.Just to back this up, there are "Indiana Jones" type microbiologists out there (as close as us real science nerds can get) who are searching for life forms on Earth that do not share the same codon usage. Such a find would probably win someone a Nobel and funding for life. This would indicate a second origin of life, a group of life that does not share common ancestry with the life we are all familiar with.

Just to clarify, Brad was engaging in a bit of revisionism. What he had said was that bacteria "bear little to nothing in common with the rest of the living world around us."I told him that was wrong and he responded with a message making it seem like I had claimed that bacteria and eukaryotes are very similar. The only point I was making to him is that bacteria have much in common with the rest of life.--Percy

It is still a very subjective evaluation. A dog breeder would say that a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are very dissimilar, and no one would criticize them for saying so. In microbiology, we even consider closely related bacteria to be "very dissimilar" at times when trying to contrast the differences between them. It's a bit like asking someone a dollar value at which someone goes from being poor to being rich. It really depends on the person and the situation.

Hi Taq,Your comments about similarity versus dissimilarity were right on the money, but what Brad said that I was responding to was "little to nothing in common" without qualification. Brad was making it seem like we were having a difference of opinion about how similar bacteria are to eukaryotes. What really happened is that Brad said that bacteria have little to nothing in common with the rest of life and I told him that, once again, he was wrong.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Make quote more complete.

Of related interest:The End of Intelligent Design?
Feb 9, 2010
Stephen M. BarrThe End of Intelligent Design? | Stephen M. Barr | First ThingsIn the comments section, note the comment by Nick Matzke for some additional background on the ID movement, and in particular their views on common descent and the age of the earth.

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

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We do have those traces. They are in our genomes. We share tRNA's and other features and these are signals consistent with shared ancestry.

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First of all, common ancestry isn't even shown to be possible. Common features are also consistent with spontaneous formation of all life and the whole 3 minutes ago. But so what? Is that alos the evidence that everythign came into being 3 minutes ago? Obviously not.In short. If you want to say that shared features are evidence for evolution, than first you have to show that common ancestry is possible, second you have to show that darwinian evolution can account for those shared features and than, that those features are the product of darwinian evolution.

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An examination of the watch will tell you how it was made. Close examination of the gears can tell you if they were forged or cast. You can examine the connections between metal parts to see if they were soddered, and using different techniques you may even be able to tell when it was soddered and where it was soddered. You can use isotope analysis to determine which batch of alloys was used to make different parts. You can even use the composition of different dyes and materials to determine it's place and time of origin. Of course, it would be even easier to look at the maker's mark.

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You can't do that. That's impossible. The question still remains, how do you know that that watch is not the product of random natural forces? Maybe it just looks like it was designed.Let's say your examintation turnes out positive the idea that the gears were soddered. Tell me, what method do you have to show that the gears aren't simply a product of random chance and are only amde to look likt they were soddered?

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Folders from a single project can be found in different trees within the nested hierarchy resulting in a violation. Computer files are not arranged in a nested hierarchy by shared commonalities. You are just as likely to find a Word file in all lineages or scattered here and there. Computer files do not fall into a nested hierarchy, and there is no reason that they should. Life DOES fall into a nested hierarchy, and design can not explain this (or rather, design does not predict any pattern of homology). Evolution can explain this pattern of homology.

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Folders on a compter can be folded into one. They do not have to be, but they can be made into one. That's my point. An intelligent agent can do that if he chooses so.And acutally, life does not fall into a perfect nested hierarchy.

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For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life, says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality, says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.

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The problems began in the early 1990s when it became possible to sequence actual bacterial and archaeal genes rather than just RNA. Everybody expected these DNA sequences to confirm the RNA tree, and sometimes they did but, crucially, sometimes they did not. RNA, for example, might suggest that species A was more closely related to species B than species C, but a tree made from DNA would suggest the reverse.

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Conventionally, sea squirtsalso known as tunicatesare lumped together with frogs, humans and other vertebrates in the phylum Chordata, but the genes were sending mixed signals. Some genes did indeed cluster within the chordates, but others indicated that tunicates should be placed with sea urchins, which aren't chordates. Roughly 50 per cent of its genes have one evolutionary history and 50 per cent another, Syvanen says.

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For example, pro-evolution textbooks often tout the Cytochrome C phylogenetic tree as allegedly matching and confirming the traditional phylogeny of many animal groups. This is said to bolster the case for common descent. However, evolutionists cherry pick this example and rarely talk about the Cytochrome B tree, which has striking differences from the classical animal phylogeny. As one article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution stated: the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene implied...an absurd phylogeny of mammals, regardless of the method of tree construction. Cats and whales fell within primates, grouping with simians (monkeys and apes) and strepsirhines (lemurs, bush-babies and lorises) to the exclusion of tarsiers. Cytochrome b is probably the most commonly sequenced gene in vertebrates, making this surprising result even more disconcerting.

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A Primer on the Tree of LifeEdited by Admin, : Fix quote.

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You indicated that the only important thing was the known function - which we agree occurred. All I did was make it clear that you earlier had argued for loss of ALL function. And you turn around and start trying to argue for the loss of ALL function again.

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1-1= 0 does it not? If the enzyme had one known function, and it lost it, than how many has it left? Obviously, the correct answer is ZERO. Meaning, no functions are left, meaning, all functions are lost.

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It's the description D, not the pattern (D,*). And the "complexity" is just the specificational resources. It certainly ISN'T the probability of D*, which is what we want.

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I know it's not. So stop mentioning it. Do you, or do you not agree that the "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller is the pattern D, whose complexity is 10^20, just as Dembski said?

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If you are referring only to the completely irrelevant unspecified complexity, then yes. But that only supports my point - we do not want nor care about that complexity. It is only the specified complexity which is never less than 0.25 for the specification - which is why that specification can never indicate design.

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Okay, so you agree that more throws are more complex than less throws. Fine, let's move on from here.If you agree that more complex objects have higher complexity, than you also agree that a flagellum consisting of 1.000.000 proteins, has a higher compexity than the one consisting of 50 proteins, right?

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The 50 proteins and their structure in the case of the flagellum. Probably some details of their arrangement, too. For my example with the coins the exact sequence - which is what your "complexity" above refers to.

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Yes, that's the complexity I'm talking about.

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In other words Dembski didn't completely botch the calculation in NFL - because Dembski says so. Unfortunately for you he did botch it. The calculation in NFL is NOT the probability of getting a "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propellor" or even close as should be quite obvious. The fact that it uses details which clearly aren't in the specification is a dead giveaway.

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What the hell are you talkign about? What did he do wrong?

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It's quite simple. if we want p(D*) we want the probability of getting ANYTHING which satisfies the description D. So we combine the probabilities of everything which satisfies D.
So either you agree to the combining, or you disagree that we want the probability of D*.

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But you do understand that the probability of a 50 protein falgellum will be different than a 1.000.000 protein flagellum?

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The probability of matching the pattern - which is what Dembski's method uses to infer design - is the probability of D*.

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And I agree with that! When I say "event" I don't mean E, I do mean D*. Because D* is teh event, but not just any, it's the event that delimits the pattern D.So, yes, I agree with Dembski. You need both the complexity of the pattern D, and the probability of the event D*.

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But only if the noise is increasing. So THAT "noise" is not genetic drift. Do pay attention to the context.

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Again, WHAT?

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No, it doesn't always happen. Populations can increase in size. They don't have to get fragmented to the extent that mutational load is a problem.

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Yes, they do increase in size, but the genetic variability stays the same regardless. And yes, they do alwasy fragment. Just look at how peope have spread around the world.

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Yes. I see that you are now agreeing with me that beneficial mutations DO help and that you were wrong to leave them out of your diagram.

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Perhaps instead of trying to cover up your mistakes you should try harder to avoid making them in the first place ?

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You are the biggest liar I have ever seen on any forum ever. Do you nto remember this picture I made!?!?!?! I specifically said that green numbers are benefitial mutations. And I have ALWAYS been sayign that they help somewhat. But that you can't invoke them to completely remove genetic entropy. You are either insanely senile, or you are deliberately lying.

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With a LOW effective population size. Which is exactly the point I made.

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How exactly does that help you? Show me the quote in the article that agrees with you.

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So what you are saying is that less than 100% effectiveness is by definition 100% effective.
I don't think that makes much sense. It's quite clear that not all deleterious mutations are removed, and not all of those that are removed are removed by selection, so selection is obviously less than 100% effective.

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No, I never said that. If natural seelction is working at less than 100% effectiveness, than it's obviously LESS than 100% effective. And that means that not all deleterious mutations will get removed.

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With a large population size and genetic mixing from sexual reproduction there will be selection for and against individual alleles. Only in the case of pure clonal reproduction would it make sense to say that the whole genome was the unit of selection. Because without that the whole genome doesn't survive. It is just a feature of one individual.

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This is physically impossible. Do you honestly think that individuals pass just portions of their genome to the offspring? No, they pass on everything. So the unit of selection is the whole genome. Natural selection can not select a single nucleotide.

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But I am not saying that drift is better than selection. I am saying that drift AND selection both remove deleterious mutations. Obviously together they will remove more than selection alone !

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Exactly. Yes they will. But not ALL of them. And that is the reson geentic entropy exists. Because natural selection, and any other mechanism you can come up with are not perfect. So the information must decline.

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Now you are just flailing. Clearly you don't know anything about this topic. You shouldn't have used it as an example - especially when arguing with someone who in fact does know a lot about this topic.

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Try and find a better example. This one, for you, is an epic fail.

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Nope. It's a great example. Just think of those people that cut the letters from newspapers and glue them on a piece of paper tho make the death threats. How do you know if that was cut with a knife or scissors, or something else? You don't.

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Seeing or not seeing something get made is not the determining factor in detecting design. It's the ability to determine the MECHANISM used.

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If you DON'T HAVE A MECHANISM, you _CAN NOT_ distinguish between NATURALLY OCCURING THINGS and DESIGNED THINGS.

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I've already given you SEVERAL EXAMPLES of NATURALLY OCCURRING THINGS which _APPEAR_ designed. You have YET to come up with a single example of something which IS design but for which there can be NO mechanism.

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That's because you _CAN'T_ give anything as an example. And you know it. Anything which you _know_ is designed was created using a mechanism you can identify.

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The _ONLY_ example you can come up with is the very thing you are claiming.

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So, it's SPECIAL PLEADING. Therefore FAIL.

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Wrong. If you find an rock in the ground. And it looks like an arrow head, how do you know it's really an arrowhead, and not just a random piece of rock? Knowing how arrowheads are made is not going to help you. Because the rock you find in the ground can simply look like it was designed. How do you tell if it is designed or not?

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Which are completely explained through naturally occurring mechanisms which we can detect, measure and reproduce in the lab.

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If we have a NATURAL solution to a problem, there is no reason to invoke BOTH a SUPERNATURAL JEW WIZARD _and_!! His MAGICALLY JEW BEAMS.

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You don't have a mechanism. We do. The end. You lose.

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Really? Explain how the ATP synthase came about.

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If this is honestly true, then you are pretty fucking stupid.

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Seriously. You've NEVER looked under the hood of a car? You've never see the inside of a clock? You've never gone into your computer to replace RAM?

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No wonder you think everything is magic. You haven't got the first clue how ANYTHING works.

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What's next? "How does a pencil work?" "How do we know a sandwich was made?"

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You need to stop posting on the internet and go get some REAL WORLD experience.

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Really now, am I bothering you that much? Just agree with me than. My point is that I don't have to know how something works to know that it was designed. When you saw a car for the first time in your life, did you know how it was made? Did you know how it works? Do you even now know EXACTLY how it works, and how it's made? No you don't. But even now, and before you would infer that it was designed, even before youever saw it.

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Of course I do. Not only do I know the mechanism of watch construction, I know the mechanism of the construction of ALL the PIECES in the watch.

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Are you _HONESTLY_ saying that you don't have the first clue how a small metal gear could be created? How a glass lense could be created? How things could be assembled one piece at a time?

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Are you actually making these claims? Are you retarded? Or are you simply being dishonest?

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It doesn't matter if you know how they COULD be created! You ahve to know how EXACTLY they are created. If you don't know that, than you don't know the mechanism.But that was not my question anyway. My question was that, if you didn't know how it was made. Would you still infer design?

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I don't have to. I'm not the one claiming that computers were created by natural causes. YOU ARE.

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If YOU can't come up with an example, that's not MY PROBLEM - it's MY POINT!!!

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Yes, you are. You are claiming that living cells were created by natural causes. They are the same thing as a computer. So yes, please do show me where natural forces created anything like that.

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Since this thread is about developing a clear picture of what ID is, why don't you tell us how ID explains the recorded history of change over time that you allude to here.

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It doesn't, becasue ID is not about that. It's a science of design detection. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yet ANOTHER example of you not knowing what you are talking about. Geez, dude. This is getting bad.Scissors cut from both sides, for short distances and generally straight. Knives cut from one side and can swerve as they slice the page.Forensics can show whether or not it was scissors of a knife, and if it's an older pair of scissors, they can match the scissors to the cut.You lose. AGAIN. Seriously? You couldn't pick a WORSE example. I have a degree in Archaeology and flintnap as a hobby.You can ABSOLUTELY distinguish between an arrowhead and an arrowhead "shaped" rock.Bifacial flaking does not occur in nature. It BARELY occurs when people try to do it. It's TRICKY as hell.MULTIPLE bifacial flakes running down the length of a flint core requires hours of precision work. Work for which......wait for it...WE HAVE A MECHANISM!!! That may be your "POINT" but your __CLAIM__ is that NO ONE NEEDS TO KNOW HOW SOMETHING WORKS IN ORDER FOR IT TO BE DESIGNED.And _THAT_ is ABSOLUTELY false.Every single example you have given has been created by PEOPLE who KNOW what they are creating and are using mechanisms which can be reproduced.Just because YOU are ignorant doesn't mean THEY are ignorant. No. The mechanism of watch creation, even watch piece creation is OBSERVABLE. It can be (and is) recreated on a regular basis.The same is NOT true for Jew Wizard Jew Beams. They have _NEVER_ been observed. They have _NEVER_ be recreated.You are just PRETENDING that they exist to explain away shit you are too lazy to learn.You're entire argument so far is this:"Cars, watches, random notes and arrowheads were all created by a magical Jewish Wizard using Jew Beams because I, Smooth Operator, wasn't there when it happened."That's, as Sarah Pallin would say, "FUCKING RETARDED!!!!!" FUCKING RETARDED.

But if ID is nothing more than design detection then it has no explanatory power. How can it replace evolution if it can't explain everything that evolution already explains? It would be like trying to replace your automobile with a bicycle.But okay, if that's what ID actually is, design detection, then I guess the question asked by this long thread has finally been answered. Now if only ID could actually *do* design detection.--Percy

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1-1= 0 does it not? If the enzyme had one known function, and it lost it, than how many has it left? Obviously, the correct answer is ZERO. Meaning, no functions are left, meaning, all functions are lost.

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And an unknown number plus one minus one plus an unknown number is an unknown number.

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I know it's not. So stop mentioning it. Do you, or do you not agree that the "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller is the pattern D, whose complexity is 10^20, just as Dembski said?

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I only agree that the number 10^20 is Dembski's estimate of the specificational resources.

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Okay, so you agree that more throws are more complex than less throws. Fine, let's move on from here.

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If you agree that more complex objects have higher complexity, than you also agree that a flagellum consisting of 1.000.000 proteins, has a higher compexity than the one consisting of 50 proteins, right?

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No, I don't agree because the "complexity" is produced from a probability calculation and we don't know what the results of the two calculations would be. It is likely that the one needing more proteins would be less probable, but it isn't certain.

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What the hell are you talkign about? What did he do wrong?

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He didn't calculate the correct probability. Or even anything resembling the correct probability. That's what he did wrong.

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But you do understand that the probability of a 50 protein falgellum will be different than a 1.000.000 protein flagellum?

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But do you understand that since both wil fit the pattern we need the probability of getting either of them ? Or any other flagellum.

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Again, WHAT?

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The "noise" in the quote is not the "noise" of genetic drift that we were talking about earlier.

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Do you nto remember this picture I made!?!?!?! I specifically said that green numbers are benefitial mutations. And I have ALWAYS been sayign that they help somewhat. But that you can't invoke them to completely remove genetic entropy. You are either insanely senile, or you are deliberately lying.

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Except that you DIDN'T allow them to offset the fitness loss. Which they do.

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How exactly does that help you? Show me the quote in the article that agrees with you.

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It helps me because it shows that the article agrees exactly with what I said. Mutational load is only a problem with a low effective population size.

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This is physically impossible. Do you honestly think that individuals pass just portions of their genome to the offspring? No, they pass on everything. So the unit of selection is the whole genome. Natural selection can not select a single nucleotide.

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You obviously don't know much about reproductive biology. Sexually reproducing species get only HALF the genome of each parent.

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Exactly. Yes they will. But not ALL of them. And that is the reson geentic entropy exists. Because natural selection, and any other mechanism you can come up with are not perfect. So the information must decline.

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Of course, since you have no sensible measure of "genetic information" any such statement is pure speculation.

Hi again Brad H, still avoiding the issues?

Issue #1: Age

First off, you should not need me to post specifically to you as the entire thread was written for you (and other creationists that complain about the age of the earth not matching what they want it to be). This is just conflict avoidance behavior.Second, your post Message 1003 was not the first time you mentioned the issue of age in this forum.See Message 33: happy birthday.

Issue #2: Walkingsticks

Because your theoretical beetle is a single species, whereas the walkingsticks are an order composed of some 39 extant species, each with different genomes.Because your theoretical beetle still has alleles for wings that are continuously selected against by the island ecology, wissuhereas there are whole species that are wingless without the selection pressure of island ecology.Because your theoretical beetle is theoretical while the walkingstick differences are documented observed objective fact. This is just more conflict avoidance behavior. Sorry, I don't do your homework for you. I have given you the available information on the web, and if this is not sufficient for you, then the onus is on you to look up the source document in your local library. Here is the source information again: It should be available in your local library.

Issue #3: "new" and "information loss" are useless concepts

Ah, so you are going to play the "hid the pea" game with semantics.When we look at actual DNA we see that we are limited to repetitions of A, G, C and T, as pointed out in Message 867: So any insertion of any one of these four basic DNA elements will never be a "new" combination, as they exist many times elsewhere in DNA. The problem is that this conflicts with your other statement regarding "new" information: The difference between "pond scum" and "people" is that there are different arrangements of those same four basic DNA elements, so either these differences are not "new" information or insertion of any of the four basic DNA elements into a strand of DNA can produce "new" information ...... or your concept of "new" is as useless as your definition of "information" as something that is always lost.Certainly there is no restriction on making the various changes in DNA other than the survival and breeding of the organism involve. Curiously, this means that evolution can proceed unhindered by your claims of "information loss" and "no new information" -- reality is once again unaffected in any way by your opinion.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : ..

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