The Scope of Intelligent Design

[perfessor]

There is currently a thread seeking a working definition for evolution; another seeking to identify the indicators for "design". My questions here seek to clarify some scope for Intelligent Design Theory (it is just a theory, right? ):

So, according to the theory:
1. Are some things designed, or is everything designed? Is it enough to show that some features - say, eyeballs and flagella, are designed? Or does the theory state that all features are designed? If the former, then the theory is easier to prove but limited in scope. If the latter, then a single counterexample shoots it out of the water.

2. Does the theory allow for multiple designers? Not trying to be facetious here - but why only one designer? If we look at, say, paintings by Picasso and Norman Rockwell, we can pretty much tell that there were (at least) two designers. Likewise, if we compare octopus eyes and human eyes; or kangaroos and deer; or chlorophyll and hemoglobin, do we not see indications that at least two designers were vying for the commission?

What do some of the proponents of ID say?

[The Happy Humanist]

How did they develope this light sensitive cell? Your speculative assumption is that this cell did actually develope...somehow....then became more complex because the animals who had them were more sucessful??? How is that?
As this eye was evolving..how big was the change that allowed this better eye to be sucessful? What changed? How many mutations were required to produce said change?

You need more than an assumption to convince someone that what you are saying is so,

Would you care to back up that last statement with some sort of reference? I have never heard that argument presented by an evo.

YEC, even a complete layman like myself can see the speciousness of your attack. It seems that you expect "evos" to present you with absolutely every intermediate step in the entire evolutionary process, and then, not as theory, but as solid facts. You ask what any prudent bystander would immediately see is impossible to provide, and then point to those gaps in our knowledge as disproof of the theory. ID is again, nothing more than the re-emergence of the God Of the Gaps. It would be foolhardy to base any attack on evolution, or support of creationism, on such a field of quicksand, as gaps have had a 5000-year history of consistently disappearing as our knowledge grows.

[YEC]

How did they develope this light sensitive cell? Your speculative assumption is that this cell did actually develope...somehow....then became more complex because the animals who had them were more sucessful??? How is that?
As this eye was evolving..how big was the change that allowed this better eye to be sucessful? What changed? How many mutations were required to produce said change?

You need more than an assumption to convince someone that what you are saying is so,

Would you care to back up that last statement with some sort of reference? I have never heard that argument presented by an evo.

YEC, even a complete layman like myself can see the speciousness of your attack. It seems that you expect "evos" to present you with absolutely every intermediate step in the entire evolutionary process, and then, not as theory, but as solid facts. You ask what any prudent bystander would immediately see is impossible to provide, and then point to those gaps in our knowledge as disproof of the theory. ID is again, nothing more than the re-emergence of the God Of the Gaps. It would be foolhardy to base any attack on evolution, or support of creationism, on such a field of quicksand, as gaps have had a 5000-year history of consistently disappearing as our knowledge grows.

Actually, I would like anything from the evos....just saying that a light receptive cell...evolved into an eye just doesn't cut it.

lets back the truck up and explain the light receptive cell first..then we'll move on.

Unlike you evos. I won't take the T.O.E based squarely on faith.

[The Happy Humanist]

Unlike you evos. I won't take the T.O.E based squarely on faith.

I think its more a matter of, you won't take the T.O.E. no matter what is provided. If we were to come up with a reasonable mechanism by which a light sensitive cell could develop from mutations, you would require a schematic diagram of exactly which gene mutated in this manner. If we came up with that, you would demand an MPEG file of it actually happening. This is Creationism's "Bart Simpson" defense: "You can't prove it, nobody saw it." It quickly wears thin, especially considering other equally successful scientific theories that you take for granted, that depend just as much on inferences from data.

[YEC]

Unlike you evos. I won't take the T.O.E based squarely on faith.

I think its more a matter of, you won't take the T.O.E. no matter what is provided. If we were to come up with a reasonable mechanism by which a light sensitive cell could develop from mutations, you would require a schematic diagram of exactly which gene mutated in this manner. If we came up with that, you would demand an MPEG file of it actually happening. This is Creationism's "Bart Simpson" defense: "You can't prove it, nobody saw it." It quickly wears thin, especially considering other equally successful scientific theories that you take for granted, that depend just as much on inferences from data.

In reality it seems as if your faith in your religion called atheism is keeping you from even considering the possibility of intelligent design.

In responce, you keep dodging the question...failing to debate the issue.

[Jose]

The extreme complexity argument of the ID fans is very silly… because … it ignores the data that exist…

Sily???? I think not my evo friend. Just what existing data does it ignore? You mentioned it is there so please present it.

Of course you don’t think it’s silly, because you don’t know the whole story on the other side of the argument.

I agree that you need data, not just assertions. Why don’t you go to PubMed and search for "eye evolution." You’ll get about 2,379 research papers, all of which will give you some of the data - -including the cute bit that some of the protein chaperones (hsp26 et al) and some enzymes (ldh) are among the ones that were co-opted (by gene duplication and alteration of the regulatory properties) to become the lens crystallins. This is a good example of how evolution works by altering what is already there.

You'll find that the ID argument is that "eyes are complex" and that "half an eye doesn't work" so, ipso facto, "aren't evolutionists silly?"

Your problem is still not furnishing a reasonable explaination of how complex building blocks that require multiple interacting functions to exist....arrived.

Here is a tiny summary of a tiny bit of it:

We propose the following scenario for the evolution of animal PRCs and eyes. Early metazoans possessed a single type of precursor PRC [photoreceptor cell] that used an ancestral opsin for light detection and was involved in photoperiodicity control and possibly in phototaxis. In prebilaterian ancestors, the opsin gene then duplicated into two paralogs, c-opsin and r-opsin, allowing the diversification of the precursor PRC into ciliary and rhabdomeric sister cell types. The rhabdomeric PRCs associated with pigment cells to form simple eyes, whereas the ciliary PRCs formed part of the evolving brain, active in nondirectional photoresponse. This ancestral setting of Bilateria is still present in extant invertebrates such as Platynereis. In the evolutionary line leading to vertebrates, both photoreceptor types were incorporated into the evolving retina. The rhabdomeric PRCs transformed into ganglion cells, acquiring a new role in image processing. A distinctive feature of vertebrate eye evolution is that the ciliary (not rhabdomeric) PRCs became the main visual PRCs, the rods and cones. The vertebrate eye thus represents a composite structure, combining distinct types of lightsensitive cells with independent evolutionary histories.

You might find it instructive to read Myers discussion, and look up any of the words or gene names that are unfamiliar to you. You will find a lot more data therein.

How did they develope this light sensitive cell? Your speculative assumption is that this cell did actually develope...somehow....then became more complex because the animals who had them were more sucessful??? How is that?
As this eye was evolving..how big was the change that allowed this better eye to be sucessful? What changed? How many mutations were required to produce said change?

Very cute. You use the time-tested tactic of asking for 100% of the story, when we all know the story is incomplete. The trouble is, it makes no sense to ask "how big" a change was. A change of an A to a G isn’t very big at all, but could have a vast influence on the development of the organism. This is a real problem with the ID approach: it plays word games, creating statements that sound like they make sense to the lay audience, but are scientifically meaningless.

I am reminded of the time our department chairman asked a question of a seminar speaker-- a graduate student, as I recall-- and the speaker replied, "it’s hard for me to explain . . . clearly . . . just why that’s such a dumb question."

Also, if you are familiar with caves, you'll know that cave fish don't have eyes. They never developed light sensitive cells because they did not need them. Or, as some scientists argue, if they were eyed fish who got caught in the caves, the no-eye gene mutation was allowed to flourish since having eyes provided no reproductive benefit in darkness.

It's not as crazy as some creationists would have you believe

Would you care to back up that last statement with some sort of reference? I have never heard that argument presented by an evo.

To be honest I think it goes against the evo theory....or are you saying that the original fish was blind and the ones that grew up in the caves never developed eyes?

This is interesting. It displays a lack of understanding of the theory of evolution. If you go back to that PubMed list of papers, you'll find a nice one by Jeffrey titled "Adaptive Evolution of Eye Degeneration in the Mexican Blind Cavefish." The original fish population in the caves was--aha!--normal fish! But, as you are so fond of pointing out, eyes are complex. Many genes are required to build current fish eyes. Mutations in many of them result in non-functional eyes, or failure of eye development. If such mutations occur, the individual fish that have them are not worse off--because it's dark anyway. Not building eyes saves energy, and avoids creating structures that can be infected, so eyeless fish have an advantage. Over time, they produce more offspring than fish with eyes, and eventually all the fish are eyeless. So tell me--how can this "go against the evo theory"?

Unlike you evos. I won't take the T.O.E based squarely on faith.

I think its more a matter of, you won't take the T.O.E. no matter what is provided.

Thanks, Jim! That really needed to be said. I'd noticed that characteristic, too.

There's another point to be made here, YEC. Several of us, including myself, have asked you for information in this thread and others. As a general rule, you have ignored our requests. The requests have generally been much easier to fill than the questions that you have asked us. You ask us for the entire sequence of events from the beginning of the universe to the present day, to prove that eyes developed from natural causes. We can look up some of it--if it's known--but none of us have it at our fingertips. We just ask you to explain what you're thinking. I'd have imagined that would be fairly easy.

We could start with the question above. Maybe later we can get back to the list of unanswered questions.

[The Happy Humanist]

Very cute. You use the time-tested tactic of asking for 100% of the story, when we all know the story is incomplete. The trouble is, it makes no sense to ask "how big" a change was. A change of an A to a G isn’t very big at all, but could have a vast influence on the development of the organism. This is a real problem with the ID approach: it plays word games, creating statements that sound like they make sense to the lay audience, but are scientifically meaningless.

If I may make one of my terribly pained analogies...and again, from a layman's standpoint. (I really wouldn't know a eukaryote from a ukelele...but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night ).

Imagine you have a jigsaw puzzle with about 80% of the pieces missing. You also don't have the box it came in so you don't know what the finished product is supposed to look like.

After putting together what pieces we have, the rough outline of a large uppercase "E" is emerging. It is barely recognizable as such, but it is definitely there.

Now, it is possible to re-do the puzzle, forcing many of the tabs into slots that they weren't really cut from, in such a way that a really crude uppercase "C" can be made from the pieces. Our point is, why bother when the puzzle seems to fit better when made into an "E", and the "E", what little of it we can see, at least, is quite elegant-looking?

This is how I picture the situation.

[YEC]

jose, cut the rhetoric...just answer the questions...please no more speculative assumption.

Now, the light sensitive cell????

[YEC]

Very cute. You use the time-tested tactic of asking for 100% of the story, when we all know the story is incomplete. The trouble is, it makes no sense to ask "how big" a change was. A change of an A to a G isn’t very big at all, but could have a vast influence on the development of the organism. This is a real problem with the ID approach: it plays word games, creating statements that sound like they make sense to the lay audience, but are scientifically meaningless.

If I may make one of my terribly pained analogies...and again, from a layman's standpoint. (I really wouldn't know a eukaryote from a ukelele...but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night ).

Imagine you have a jigsaw puzzle with about 80% of the pieces missing. You also don't have the box it came in so you don't know what the finished product is supposed to look like.

After putting together what pieces we have, the rough outline of a large uppercase "E" is emerging. It is barely recognizable as such, but it is definitely there.

Now, it is possible to re-do the puzzle, forcing many of the tabs into slots that they weren't really cut from, in such a way that a really crude uppercase "C" can be made from the pieces. Our point is, why bother when the puzzle seems to fit better when made into an "E", and the "E", what little of it we can see, at least, is quite elegant-looking?

This is how I picture the situation.

Will you provide us whith an example of how evolution is "definitely there'" when considering components that are complex and require several other complex peices all working together to fullfill their function?

How many times do I have to ask this or a similar question?

Do you evos really have no answer????????

[The Happy Humanist]

Will you provide us whith an example of how evolution is "definitely there'" when considering components that are complex and require several other complex peices all working together to fullfill their function?

How many times do I have to ask this or a similar question?

](*,)

[YEC]

Evos like jimspeiser like to claim this stuff happens...but when asked to present some evidence the best they can do is bang their head against a wall.....in a stubborn assertion of their very own type of "god did it" logic.

Many consider the evos as hypocrites.