Intelligent design (evidence)

If ID'ers want to maintain their hypothesis is not based in religion, the designer must be human. The ID assumption is that we can recognise design by its resemblance to human design, the only form of design we know.

If we assume the Designer is not human, the definition of 'design' becomes a moving goalpost, and the assumptions of ID become unfalsifiable. The only reason to maintain them then, is the religious(creationist) origin of ID.

Instead of design, it would be better to talk about accumulated complexities. Design is a complexity that accumulated through evolving human culture, biology is a complexity that accumulated through genetic evolution.

Yes, but to me that seems exactly what is wrong with ID. The definition of 'intelligence', as used by ID'ers, means this is begging the question.
The ID argument also appeals to human vanity if the appeal to ID is religiously based. If aliens are the source, then I'm at a loss for words.
 
If ID'ers want to maintain their hypothesis is not based in religion, the designer must be human. The ID assumption is that we can recognise design by its resemblance to human design, the only form of design we know.
Wait a minute. We design based upon the restrictions of the laws of physics, not on our "human-ness". The Intelligent Designer designs the universe and laws of physics based upon whatever the creator sees fit.
 
Wait a minute. We design based upon the restrictions of the laws of physics, not on our "human-ness". The Intelligent Designer designs the universe and laws of physics based upon whatever the creator sees fit.
You're just assuming that. The intelligent design hypothesis is based on analogy to human design, as Bart said. Any further assumptions about the designer are outside the analogy.

In particular, the designer cannot be the creator, because humans can only design and build with existing materials.

~~ Paul
 
You're just assuming that. The intelligent design hypothesis is based on analogy to human design, as Bart said. Any further assumptions about the designer are outside the analogy.

In particular, the designer cannot be the creator, because humans can only design and build with existing materials.

~~ Paul
I must have missed something, I don't understand.
 
All you have is an analogy to human design. If you take it beyond that, you're even further out on a limb.

~~ Paul
The odds of a universe popping into existence that just happen to be finely tuned for organic life to appear are 1:10^300. The fact that the universe is made out of something we can't see, but obeys the Creators laws, compared to humans who generally make things out of wood, concrete and steel, is completely irrellavent. Right?
 
Here is another example of why it is a waste of time to pay attention to the ID skeptics. (Previous examples in this thread here and here.) When a mainstream scientist makes a point they say nothing, but if an ID proponent makes the same point, the ID skeptics 1) mischaracterize the point 2) make bogus criticisms and 3) make insulting remarks against the ID proponent. Then when a mainstream lab finds even the mischaracterized point is valid and supports ID theory, the ID skeptics are silent.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/07/a_pretty_sharp088281.html
A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA has vindicated Michael Behe in one of the central controversies over his 2007 book The Edge of Evolution. Behe already reported here on the paper, which found that multiple mutations, at least two, are required to confer resistance to the drug chloroquine on malaria parasites:
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Behe's argument in The Edge of Evolution didn't depend on whether chloroquine resistance arose in a stepwise manner, or only after multiple mutations accumulated. His argument was based upon an empirically observed data point from public health studies which found that chloroquine resistance arose in about 1 in every 1020 organisms. He had a strong citation for this empirical observation: Nicholas White, "Antimalarial Drug Resistance," Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol. 113: 1084-1092 (2004). He called the mutations (whatever they were) that caused chloroquine resistance a "chloroquine complexity cluster" or CCC. Whatever molecular mechanisms may be behind a CCC, empirical data showed that 10^20 cells are required in order to produce one. Behe pointed out that if a trait required the molecular equivalent of two CCC's before providing any advantage, then that would pose major problems for Darwinian evolution.

It's a simple calculation. Behe observed that if 10^20 organisms were required to obtain one CCC, then the square of that amount -- 10^40 organisms -- would be required to evolve a trait that required two CCC's before providing any advantage. However, as Behe observed, a total of only 10^40 organisms have lived on Earth over the entire history of the planet.
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Will Ken Miller, Jerry Coyne, Paul Gross, Nick Matzke, Sean Carroll, Richard Dawkins, and PZ Myers Now Apologize to Michael Behe?

Behe's critics misread him as saying that a single CCC necessarily required multiple simultaneous mutations, and castigated Behe for allegedly ignoring the possibility of a single CCC arising via sequential mutations. For example:

• Kenneth Miller: "It would be difficult to imagine a more breathtaking abuse of statistical genetics. Behe obtains his probabilities by considering each mutation as an independent event, ruling out any role for cumulative selection, and requiring evolution to achieve an exact, predetermined result." (Nature, 2007)

• Paul Gross: "Behe assumes simultaneous mutations at two sites in the relevant gene, but there is no such necessity and plenty of evidence that cumulativeness, rather than simultaneity, is the rule. As Nature's reviewer (Kenneth R. Miller) notes, 'It would be difficult to imagine a more breathtaking abuse of statistical genetics.'" (The New Criterion, 2007)


• Jerry Coyne: "What has Behe now found to resurrect his campaign for ID? It's rather pathetic, really. ... Behe requires all of the three or four mutations needed to create such an interaction to arise simultaneously. ... If it looks impossible, this is only because of Behe's bizarre and unrealistic assumption that for a protein-protein interaction to evolve, all mutations must occur simultaneously, because the step-by-step path is not adaptive." (The New Republic, 2007)


• Nick Matzke: "Here is the flabbergasting line of argument. First, Behe admits that CQR evolves naturally, but contends that it requires a highly improbable simultaneous double mutation, occurring in only 1 in 1020 parasites. ... The argument collapses at every step." (Trends In Ecology and Evolution, 2007)


• Sean Carroll: "Behe makes a new set of explicit claims about the limits of Darwinian evolution, claims that are so poorly conceived and readily dispatched that he has unwittingly done his critics a great favor in stating them. ... Behe's main argument rests on the assertion that two or more simultaneous mutations are required for increases in biochemical complexity and that such changes are, except in rare circumstances, beyond the limit of evolution. .. Examples of cumulative selection changing multiple sites in evolving proteins include ... pyrimethamine resistance in malarial parasites -- a notable omission given Behe's extensive discussion of malarial drug resistance. ... [T]he argument for design has no scientific leg to stand on." (Science, 2007)


• Richard Dawkins: "Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. ... If correct, Behe's calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation." (New York Times, 2007)


• And then of course there's PZ Myers. He made much the same criticisms, and also wrote:
Behe isn't just a crackpot who thinks he has a novel explanation for an evolutionary mechanism -- he's a radical anti-evolutionist extremist who rejects the entire notion of the transformation of species by natural processes. ... Most of the arguments are gussied up versions of the kind of handwaving, ignorant rationalizations you'd get from some pomaded fundagelical Baptist minister who got all his biology from the Bible, not at all what you'd expect from a tenured professor of biochemistry at a good university -- throwing in an occasional technical gloss or mangled anecdote from the literature is only a gloss to fool the rubes.
 
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http://www.uncommondescent.com/biology/the-limits-of-self-organisation/

The Limits of Self Organisation
...
Posted by Richard Johns
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My argument is not especially concerned with the creative powers of natural selection, since it covers self-organisation in general. But the limitative theorem does entail that natural selection cannot have the powers that are often claimed.
...
My argument does simply rule out the self organization of complex objects


http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/spontaneous_4.pdf
Self-Organisation in Dynamical Systems:
A limiting result
Richard Johns
...
INTRODUCTION
Self organization, or “order for free”, is an important (and expanding) area of inquiry.
Self-organized structures occur in many contexts, including biology. While these
structures may be intricate and impressive, there are some limitations on the kinds of
structure than can self-organize, given the dynamical laws. (William Paley pointed out,
for example, that a watch cannot be produced by “the laws of metallic nature”.) In this
paper I will demonstrate that certain fundamental symmetries in the laws of physics
constrain self organization in an interesting way. Roughly speaking, structures that are
both large and non-self-similar cannot self organize in any dynamical system.
 
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/01/peer-reviewed_pro-intelligent042261.html
In a peer-reviewed paper titled "Evidence of Design in Bird Feathers and Avian Respiration," in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Leeds University professor Andy McIntosh argues that two systems vital to bird flight--feathers and the avian respiratory system--exhibit "irreducible complexity."
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Regarding the structure of feathers, he argues that they require many features present in order to properly function and allow flight:
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He further notes that many evolutionary authors "look for evidence that true feathers developed first in small non-flying dinosaurs before the advent of flight, possibly as a means of increasing insulation for the warm-blooded species that were emerging." However, he finds that when it comes to fossil evidence for the evolution of feathers, "[n]one of the fossil evidence shows any evidence of such transitions."
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McIntosh contends that a functional transition from a purported reptilian respiratory system to the avian design would lead to non-functional intermediate stages. He quotes John Ruben stating, "The earliest stages in the derivation of the avian abdominal air sac system from a diaphragm-ventilating ancestor would have necessitated selection for a diaphragmatic hernia in taxa transitional between theropods and birds. Such a debilitating condition would have immedi¬ately compromised the entire pulmonary ventilatory apparatus and seems unlikely to have been of any selective advantage." With such unique constraints in mind, McIntosh argues that the "even if one does take the fossil evidence as the record of development, the evidence is in fact much more consistent with an ab initio design position - that the breathing mechanism of birds is in fact the product of intelligent design."
 
http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2014.2/BIO-C.2014.2


But if living things embody natural laws in addition to those that govern non-living matter, the Newtonian approach is mistaken. Relational biology begins with the opposite assumption—namely, that atoms and the universe embody a subset of the natural laws governing living things.
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As we have seen, however, the idea that embryo development is controlled by a genetic program is inconsistent with the biological evidence. Embryo development requires far more ontogenetic information than is carried by DNA sequences. Thus Neo-Darwinism is false.
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Embryo development (ontogeny) depends on developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs), but dGRNs depend on pre-existing spatial anisotropies that are defined by early embryonic axes, and those axes are established long before the embryo’s dGRNs are put in place. For example, the anterior-posterior axis in Drosophila and the animal-vegetal axis in Xenopus and echinoderms are initially derived from the architecture of the ovary through processes mediated by cytoskeletal and membrane patterns rather than dGRNs. This review focuses on plasma membrane patterns, which serve essential ontogenetic functions by providing targets and sources for intracellular signaling and transport, by regulating cell-cell interactions, and by generating endogenous electric fields that provide three-dimensional coordinate systems for embryo development. Membrane patterns are not specified by DNA sequences. Because of processes such as RNA splicing, RNA editing, protein splicing, alternative protein folding, and glycosylation, DNA sequences do not specify the final functional forms of most membrane components. Still less does DNA specify the spatial arrangements of those components. Yet their spatial arrangements carry essential ontogenetic information. The fact that membrane patterns carry ontogenetic information that is not specified by DNA poses a problem for any theory of evolution (such as Neo-Darwinism) that attributes the origin of evolutionary novelties to changes in a genetic program—-whether at the level of DNA sequences or dGRNs. This review concludes by suggesting that relational biology and category theory might be a promising new approach to understanding how the ontogenetic information in membrane patterns could be specified and undergo the orchestrated changes needed for embryo development.
 
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The odds of a universe popping into existence that just happen to be finely tuned for organic life to appear are 1:10^300. The fact that the universe is made out of something we can't see, but obeys the Creators laws, compared to humans who generally make things out of wood, concrete and steel, is completely irrellavent. Right?
Wrong. All you have is an analogy. You're stretching it so thin the quarks are showing.

Can you show the probability formula for that 10^300 guess?

~~ Paul
 
Here is another example of why it is a waste of time to pay attention to the ID skeptics. (Previous examples in this thread here and here.) When a mainstream scientist makes a point they say nothing, but if an ID proponent makes the same point, the ID skeptics 1) mischaracterize the point 2) make bogus criticisms and 3) make insulting remarks against the ID proponent. Then when a mainstream lab finds even the mischaracterized point is valid and supports ID theory, the ID skeptics are silent.
Clearly you don't pay much attention to the scientists talking among themselves. Check out the ENCODE project discussions, for example.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/07/a_pretty_sharp088281.html
The text you quoted doesn't appear on that page.

~~ Paul
 
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/designun.html

If you add up all of the exponents, it's really 1 in 10^311.
They don't provide values for all 34 fine-tuning parameters in their list, so the actual fine tuning is even greater than you can calculate with the information on that web page.

I found this one from another source:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-fine-tuning-of-universe-to-one-part.html
Initial Entropy of the Universe: 1:10^10^123 (one in ten to the tenth to the 123rd) (ref. 3)
If larger: stars would not form within proto-galaxies
If smaller: no proto-galaxies would form
 
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that's doing the calculation to get this particular configuration - like figuring out the odds of getting one particular deal of a deck of cards. Our particular universe is the result of one particular shuffling of the cards.

What we don't know - for the time being at least probably can't know - is if we had had a different shuffle during the big bang what the chances are for producing a universe that wouldn't necessarily produce life as ours did, but produced a different kind of life.
 
that's doing the calculation to get this particular configuration - like figuring out the odds of getting one particular deal of a deck of cards. Our particular universe is the result of one particular shuffling of the cards.

What we don't know - for the time being at least probably can't know - is if we had had a different shuffle during the big bang what the chances are for producing a universe that wouldn't necessarily produce life as ours did, but produced a different kind of life.

there are probably a few combinations that are outlandishly improbable, but that will give life.
 
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