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Member (Idle past 1393 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Design With No Designer | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
Anyone who has been involved in engineering process will know
that those lines aren't even drawn in man-made design!!!
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1393 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Let's not overstate the case. Certainly there is ambiguity among the concepts of product, design process, and designer when it comes to human creations. However, it's easy at least to visualize a sculptor in the process of chipping away at a block of marble to create a work of art.
The emergence of a new species or sensory organ, in contrast, is much more difficult to perceive. As we have discussed, the bacterial flagellum is probably adapted from a previous secretory system, but at what point did it cease serving primarily its secretory function and become a full fledged flagellum? We Darwinists, of course, dismiss such a question as irrelevant. The cumulative variation and selection process over countless generations transformed the system into the one so close to the hearts of IDC proponents today. Coding for the proteins that comprise the flagellum is the very mechanism that contains the design history itself. Any distinctions we could make between design and designer, or designer and product, are arbitrary at best. The Intelligent Design Creationists, on the other hand, dismiss this as just the sort of reductionism that robs Nature of its wonder. Anyone who has read Dembski's treatment of the flagellum as a 'discrete combinatorial object' realizes how desperate IDC is to force us to accept these problematic distinctions. I assert that IDC sells Nature short. I'm second to no one in my capacity to be staggered by the complexity of life on Earth, and impressed to no end by the design work of purposeless processes. It's a sign of IDC's contempt for Nature that people like Behe and Dembski insist upon attributing all its wonder to a generic designer.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
I find it easy to visualise natural selection chipping away
at the bio-sphere and sculpting innumerable, exquisite forms that are suited to the prevailing environment ... that doesn't stop people claiming it cannot possibly have happened that way. I think we agree in the main ... a creator detracts fromnature rather than adds to it.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1393 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
quote: The more that I think about it, the better the sculptor analogy sounds. If a sculptor gets rid of everything except the intended design, then natural selection wipes out every design except the one which the circumstances recognize as the fittest.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
The problem with human design analogies is intention.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1393 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Analogies are indispensible for clarifying a point, or helping a layman visualize a technical scientific concept. They can also be used to draw attention away from problematic areas of a hypothesis, or to support claims that lack any other substantiation. Two examples can illustrate the use and misuse of such devices.
In 'Evolution and the Myth of Creationism,' Tim Berra used pictures of Corvette models over three consecutive years to help readers visualize descent with modification. I recall Phillip Johnson coined the term 'Berra's Blunder' to describe the use of man-made artifacts to explain natural phenomena. While I feel Berra could have just as easily used photographs of sharks or birds to make his point, I hardly think he was trying to assert that a) Corvettes evolve naturally or that b) pictures of Corvettes prove a point about natural history. Notice the difference between that example and one from Dembski, who stated that 'we know from experience that Intelligence is capable of producing IC systems.' He failed to mention that the IC systems he used as evidence of the power of Intelligence are man-made artifacts whose origin is not in dispute. This is meant to obscure people's understanding of the issue at hand, not to aid it.
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Mammuthus Member (Idle past 6475 days) Posts: 3085 From: Munich, Germany Joined: |
Ah yes, the old "evolution can't be true because if you found a 20,000 year old swiss watch on top of a mountain it would be clear evidence of design" schtick...What I love about all the ID examples is they unfailingly pick systems that cannot pass on heritable traits like watches or cars or mousetraps and are therefore completely useless examples. But it probably makes a nice sound bite at the local fundie church in between the dancing with rattlesnakes and speaking in tongues....
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
I agree about the power of a good analogy ... it's a shame
that many of those to whom such are directed are so used to literal interpretations of text that they start screaming about the bits that don't match ... and totally miss the point in the process.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
Perhaps they should spend more time addressing the issues
that are relevent. As far as I can see intelligent design postulates thatbiological systems originated from a design act by an intelligent individual. To support that they need to put forward some convincingcriterion for the identification of design (but as this thread and one of my own have pointed out) evolution can output 'designs' ... and make statements of what trace 'intelligence' should be expected to leave on a design. We cannot know how a designer will designer, but there mustbe some aspect of intelligently designed artifacts that can differentiate them from dumb design. That was the question I asked in 'Intelligence Behind Design'
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Mammuthus Member (Idle past 6475 days) Posts: 3085 From: Munich, Germany Joined: |
quote: This is precisely the problem the IDists (or IDiots as I have heard them called on other boards) face. There is no testable hypothesis to differentiate an intelligently designed from naturally designed system. The IDists either use a clearly human fabricated example like a car and then say it can not evolve and then extrapolate it to a biological system (which can pass on traits from one generation to the next) and say they cannot evolve either and were therefore designed. This is not a testable or falsifiable hypothesis (i.e. science) this is arguing from incredulity and the assumption that just because they are not bright enough to come up with a model of evolution of complexity that nobody else can...top that off with a religious agenda and you have a completely worthless pseudo-science movement pressing a creationist agenda while trying to mask itself as actual science....the only thing even remotely clever about the whole thing is that it is a far better PR instrument than having carpet chewing fundies screaming about "atheists darwinists trying to kill go" and other such nonesense..but both groups are fundamentally the same with regards to the scientific merits of their positions.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1393 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
quote: I've heard proponents of IDC argue that our understanding of the genome is an example of the shortcomings of a materialistic scientific outlook. The notion of 'junk DNA' has given way, they say, to the realization that non-coding DNA may have other uses. If we had taken a 'design perspective' from the beginning, they claim, we might be ahead of where we are today in understanding the uses of non-coding DNA. I don't want to turn this into a discussion of the genome. However, the glib notion of 'junk DNA' always rubbed this Darwinist the wrong way. Why wouldn't non-coding DNA be selected out of the genome if it had no use whatsoever? I always suspected that duplicating billions of completely useless nucleotides during every replication would be woefully inefficient. So it goes back to the shortcomings of the 'design perspective' and the inability of IDC to set a threshold beyond which we can assume something is not the product of intelligence. Would the intelligent designer create a genome with any truly useless DNA whatsoever? And how much 'junk DNA' would be enough to falsify the notion that it was designed by intelligence?
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Mammuthus Member (Idle past 6475 days) Posts: 3085 From: Munich, Germany Joined: |
As someone who works with "junk DNA" it is a term that has served genomics badly since retroelements (which can be extremely important biologically) are often just filtered out of analysis. Though perhaps not something done by IDists in all cases, co-opting a term and then bending it in such a way to misrepresent a field (as you indicate with IDists using junk DNA as evidence of design) is not uncommon. Look at the misuse of "living fossils" by creationists.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1479 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
I'm guessing the 'junk DNA' term is a pop.lit.
thing anyhow ... In terms of finding 'intelligence' behind genomes I would thinkthat one would have to suspect non-intelligent intervention based upon 'broken genes' (like Vit.C synthesis is humans and guinea pigs). It's like transmission error in digital media accidently adding a new-line/carriage return sequence. My feeling is that if evolution doesn't happen why did thedesigner spend the effort to develop an adaptive system? If ID wants to target abiogenesis (or not) then OK, but itdoesn't make any sense to try to refute evolution with the claims I have seen IDer's make ... which is a poor line of suport in any case (refuting something else doesn't proove your own case).
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Silent H Member (Idle past 5820 days) Posts: 7405 From: satellite of love Joined: |
mammuthus writes: ...or IDiots as I have heard them called on other boards... Heheheh. I have used IDIOT theory to refer to any practice of ID theory--- the scientific study of evidence that living beings were designed--- that moves beyond the strictly scientific to besically creationist material. The latter theory is filled with calls to analogies instead of evidence, and spend time talking about the intended endpoints of those designs when they have yet to prove where design began and by what or whom. Not surprisingly IDIOT theory makes up most purported ID theory literature. Someone (I think mr Hambre) has called it IDC theory, for Intelligent Design Creationism. That is probably a nicer way of achieving the same result. It was simply after reading too much ID literature--- which involves an inordinate amount of analogy and teleology--- that it seemed more appropriate to call it: Intelligent Design and Inferred Organic Teleology theory. Sorry for the side note, back to the thread... ------------------holmes
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1393 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
quote: Tell the Discovery Institute to throw out all their old stationery. Once we agree on a logo we're sending this baby to the printers. ------------------Quien busca, halla
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