Intelligent Design explains many follies

Good to know that you're not addressing anyone here, at least regarding the way randomness applies to evolution. Evolution is not a random process. It is composed of two major parts: mutation and natural selection. While mutation is random, natural selection is not, so evolution as a whole is a process that acts nonrandomly upon something that is random.Let me clarify that with an example. Imagine if you had 100 dice. If you encountered a bunch of dice, all with the 6 side facing up, you would think that someone had simply set them all up like that. The reason you would think that is probably because if you dumped them all on the floor, it would be very unlikely that you would get all sixes. In fact, the odds of this occuring are about one chance in 6.53x10^77.But if you rolled the dice, and left all the dice with sixes on them on the floor, and picked up all the rest, then threw those back on the floor, you would have more sixes the second time around than you had the first. If you kept removing everything that wasn't a six and rethrowing it, it would probably take only a few dozen throws to get all sixes.Life works in a somewhat similar way. You start with something that is somewhat likely to come about suddenly, and then it is altered over many generations until it is very different from how it began. The end product is extremely unlikely to come about on its own, giving the illusion of design.Computers aren't the best analogy to describe either evolution or intelligent design, in my opinion. While they were certainly designed by intelligent humans, and though they changed over time as new designs were invented, they differ from living things in that computers do not reproduce the way life does. Living organisms carry genetic information in their DNA, and this is passed on to their offspring with a high, but imperfect, degree of accuracy. Computers do not do this. Entirely new components can be added or changed in ways that would be impossible for living things. If information is moved from one computer to another, changes during that transition are to be avoided as much as possible.Someone else touched on this point earlier in the thread, but there have been computer programs that use evolutionary algorithms to solve problems and design new software. These programs seem to evolve in a way much more similar to that of living things than does the entire computer, as natural selection and mutation is used to generate some new, complex program. Creationists often say things like this, but I don't understand why. It is as though you expect all the biologists to stand up and say "Well that sounds reasonable, someone from Mars created everything!" We aren't so opposed to the idea of a god that we would rather have faith in aliens, we just want our beliefs to be supported by evidence. If we had some evidence that life originated on Mars, we would want to investigate that and figure out how it happened there, just as scientists are trying to figure out how life originated on Earth, according to our present understanding. Scientists would not stop asking questions just because someone gave an explanation that doesn't invoke a diety.

Did Dr. Templeman study the mangosteen, by any chance? Though I am often skeptical of herbal or alternative medicine, many living things do produce chemicals that are useful to the body, including some that are can be used in medicine. It is certainly possible that mangosteens have some interesting and useful properties.Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that either creationists or scientists were unable or unwilling to say "No" or "I don't know" when the time comes to do so. I was attempting to comment on the idea that Earth could have been seeded by aliens, because I've heard that suggestion made before. It seems to be a response to a certain criticism of Intelligent Design. Some people say that Intelligent Design makes no claims on the identity of the creator of life, although many of its proponents are young Earth creationists who believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis. If Intelligent Design makes no claims as to the creator's identity, it could have been aliens, rather than the Judeochristian God. However, this response simply begs the question as to who created the aliens, essentially moving abiogenesis or the act of creation to some other planet that we can't study right now, and without any explanation or evidence to do so.I expect that if any evidence ever arises indicating that life originated on some planet other than Earth, it will not be the proponents of Intelligent Design who find it.

You have to define what a "useful mutant" is. Maybe a useful mutation could be something that increases an organism's fitness, that is, its ability to make more viable offspring. What could change in a fruit fly to make it reproduce more effectively?If a fruit fly lives in a lab, and gains an easily detectable mutation that other flies lack, maybe a scientist will pick out that fly and breed more of them. Wouldn't this be an example of a beneficial mutation, as the mutant fly would have many more offspring than other flies, and these flies would be carrying their ancestor's mutation? The ancestor mutant fly would effectively have a higher fitness, simply because it did something that is useful to a human.Useful mutants have been found. Have you ever heard about the bacteria that "learned" how to break down nylon? That seems like a beneficial mutation to me. It was beneficial enough that bacteria with that ability showed up in waste water from a nylon factory. That evolutionary event has the unique distinction of being replicated in the lab.This message has been edited by Gary, 02-25-2006 08:33 PM

Isn't this arguement a bit like claiming the words in a book came about on their own, while the book itself, and its binding and paper and everything, was designed?The evolutionary software is simply an environment in which the programs to be tested are allowed to exist. There needs to be some sort of place for them to exist. With living things however, I don't see why an intelligent designer would have to design something like mud or seawater or whatever life originated in.This message has been edited by Gary, 02-25-2006 08:39 PM

Nylon contains a type of bond not present in any known biological system. Do these herbicides also contain bonds not found anywhere else? Is the human body actually breaking them down, or are they simply stored in fatty tissue, or excreted by the kidneys?