I would just add that this demonstrates where the creationist attempt to liken DNA to a "code" collapses. A written code requires intelilgent intervention at some point. The patterns of letters on a page have no meaning except one that has been arbitrarily and deliberately imposed upon them by an intelligent agent. As Rumraket has shown, no such agent is required in the process of "translating" the base sequence of a DNA molecule into a biological structure.

Evidence for ID right here.

Animavore wrote:Evidence for ID right here.

Except we now have organisms running around with "Craig Venter was here" inscribed in their genome. Which means that even if we find the equivalent of "Made by God" written in a genome, that still doesn't prove evolution wrong and creationism right. It just means there was some intelligent input at some point in the process in one particular case. As was mentioned earlier, if GM organisms came to dominate the biosphere at some point in the future, it would be wrong for future biologists to conclude that life as whole resulted from ID.

Mr P wrote:I'd say the whole history of design is evolutionary in some sense. For example I work in the aerospace industry and the elements we bring together to design a particular component are reliant on existing developments that have been tweaked little by little over the last century. Elements that are frequently co-opted (exapted?) from other fields give a non-linear element to whatever algorithm we operate under whenever we make a decision, the internal combustion engine was never designed to fly. If a design didn't evolve after an initial idea we'd still be flying round in one of the Wright brother glorified box kites and a rich historical heritage wouldn't exist as it does today.

Also, as I can bear witness, there's no necessity for intelligence in design

A point I made in this earlier post, and indeed, I referred to the early history of aircraft in that post. Great minds think alike.

GrahamH wrote:

Ubjon wrote:I bought this weeks Scientific America this week (Usually just get New Scientist as Scientific America is devoid of humour) and there was an article (Could have been the editorial but the missus has put it away somewhere and I can't find it to check) and basically pointed out that much of our 'designed' technology is the product of natural selection in that we largely just try stuff until something works and then concentrate on that.

Very little of our technology was produced fit for purpose and had to evolve through natural selection which does somewhat undermine the whole watchmaker argument beyond the counter argument that Dawkins put forward in his Blind Watchmaker.

I agree with your point, but "our 'designed' technology" is is not shaped by 'natural selection'.

However, a selection process takes place. We decide what the fitness function is going to be, just as we've been doing with livestock for millennia. Yet no one claims that human-derived livestock are "designed", other than perhaps the terminally blinkered.

GrahamH wrote:That's what makes it 'technology' - We select it.

But we're not an all-knowing supernatural agent. We're a part of the natural world. Therefore, our selection processes are every bit as 'natural' as those performed by predators, pathogens and environmental conditions in wild ecosystems. The only difference being that unlike those other entities, we possess intent. That is the key distinction between our selection processes and those extant in the biosphere - our selection processes involve intent, and some predetermined goal, however well or ill defined, whilst selection processes in wild ecosystems do not involve intent and predetermination. However, they are both selection processes, and operate in the same fundamental manner.

GrahamH wrote:Of course we are 'natural', but the distinction between natural formation and 'deliberate design by a mind' has to be considered in this context.

Except that, once again, the word "design" here is woefully fluid and non-rigorous, and even more so in creationist usage. Human "design", as has already been demonstrated, involves a large degree of trial and error, followed by the discarding of the failures, and as such bears considerable resemblance to an evolutionary process. Creationists use this, entirely speciously, to justify the wholly unwarranted conclusion that an all-powerful magic entity purportedly arranged for millions of components to be integrated, with purported "perfect" foreknowledge of how those components would interact once thus integrated, and the process they are erecting via this unwarranted jumping to pre-determined conclusion differs substantively from human "design" in numerous important aspects, to such an extent that the conclusion jumping is wholly unwarranted. "Lots of human beings trying things out, discarding the failures and building upon the successful attempts" in NO way justifies "Magic Man applied perfect foreknowledge and turned out the acme of design all over the biosphere", which is the wholly specious leap that creationists make. A leap that is, incidentally, rendered wholly fatuous by the very mythology they claim dictates how reality works. Because according to that mythology, their magic man made us, and upon doing so, introduced the very element into the system that was guaranteed to make it go tits up, even if one accepts the numerous unsupported assertions of that mythology. The fact that the entire Genesis cock and bull story was a blatant set-up job from the start merely renders their assertions even more absurd.

Oh, and Rumraket, I can't download your .rar file. I keep receiving the message "your download session has expired". E-Mail it to me (my E-Mail address can handle the .rar file if it's less than 10 megs).

Shrunk wrote:

Animavore wrote:Evidence for ID right here.

Except we now have organisms running around with "Craig Venter was here" inscribed in their genome. Which means that even if we find the equivalent of "Made by God" written in a genome, that still doesn't prove evolution wrong and creationism right. It just means there was some intelligent input at some point in the process in one particular case. As was mentioned earlier, if GM organisms came to dominate the biosphere at some point in the future, it would be wrong for future biologists to conclude that life as whole resulted from ID.

All the more so because future biologists would have access to the mountains of documentation produced by the prior biologists who performed those manipulations. In that case, we would have real evidence of something that could be labelled "design", because the "designers" would have left behind massive amounts of documentation detailing what they did, how they did it, and why. Nothing of the sort exists for Mr Invisible Magic Man.

Calilasseia wrote:

Mr P wrote:I'd say the whole history of design is evolutionary in some sense. For example I work in the aerospace industry and the elements we bring together to design a particular component are reliant on existing developments that have been tweaked little by little over the last century. Elements that are frequently co-opted (exapted?) from other fields give a non-linear element to whatever algorithm we operate under whenever we make a decision, the internal combustion engine was never designed to fly. If a design didn't evolve after an initial idea we'd still be flying round in one of the Wright brother glorified box kites and a rich historical heritage wouldn't exist as it does today.

Also, as I can bear witness, there's no necessity for intelligence in design

A point I made in this earlier post, and indeed, I referred to the early history of aircraft in that post. Great minds think alike.

GrahamH wrote:

Ubjon wrote:I bought this weeks Scientific America this week (Usually just get New Scientist as Scientific America is devoid of humour) and there was an article (Could have been the editorial but the missus has put it away somewhere and I can't find it to check) and basically pointed out that much of our 'designed' technology is the product of natural selection in that we largely just try stuff until something works and then concentrate on that.

Very little of our technology was produced fit for purpose and had to evolve through natural selection which does somewhat undermine the whole watchmaker argument beyond the counter argument that Dawkins put forward in his Blind Watchmaker.

I agree with your point, but "our 'designed' technology" is is not shaped by 'natural selection'.

However, a selection process takes place. We decide what the fitness function is going to be, just as we've been doing with livestock for millennia. Yet no one claims that human-derived livestock are "designed", other than perhaps the terminally blinkered.

GrahamH wrote:That's what makes it 'technology' - We select it.

But we're not an all-knowing supernatural agent. We're a part of the natural world. Therefore, our selection processes are every bit as 'natural' as those performed by predators, pathogens and environmental conditions in wild ecosystems. The only difference being that unlike those other entities, we possess intent. That is the key distinction between our selection processes and those extant in the biosphere - our selection processes involve intent, and some predetermined goal, however well or ill defined, whilst selection processes in wild ecosystems do not involve intent and predetermination. However, they are both selection processes, and operate in the same fundamental manner.

GrahamH wrote:Of course we are 'natural', but the distinction between natural formation and 'deliberate design by a mind' has to be considered in this context.

Except that, once again, the word "design" here is woefully fluid and non-rigorous, and even more so in creationist usage. Human "design", as has already been demonstrated, involves a large degree of trial and error, followed by the discarding of the failures, and as such bears considerable resemblance to an evolutionary process. Creationists use this, entirely speciously, to justify the wholly unwarranted conclusion that an all-powerful magic entity purportedly arranged for millions of components to be integrated, with purported "perfect" foreknowledge of how those components would interact once thus integrated, and the process they are erecting via this unwarranted jumping to pre-determined conclusion differs substantively from human "design" in numerous important aspects, to such an extent that the conclusion jumping is wholly unwarranted. "Lots of human beings trying things out, discarding the failures and building upon the successful attempts" in NO way justifies "Magic Man applied perfect foreknowledge and turned out the acme of design all over the biosphere", which is the wholly specious leap that creationists make. A leap that is, incidentally, rendered wholly fatuous by the very mythology they claim dictates how reality works. Because according to that mythology, their magic man made us, and upon doing so, introduced the very element into the system that was guaranteed to make it go tits up, even if one accepts the numerous unsupported assertions of that mythology. The fact that the entire Genesis cock and bull story was a blatant set-up job from the start merely renders their assertions even more absurd.

To be clear, I am not defending ID. I completely agree that human design is like evolutionary processes in its chance variation and selection. To the limited extent that human design processes seek specific goals, evolution looks nothing like it. I say limited extent because human technology is domniated by unintended/unplanned consequences/innovations beyond a time-scale of a few years.

The modern theology based on Abrahamic religions are easily dismissed (as you have ably shown on many occasions ), but responses to deistic/pantheistic notions of ID take a bit more care.

If there were, in some sense, an intentional goal seeking system inherent in the universe that was selecting patterns that moved toward the 'goals', that would count as a form of ID. If a natural human mind can achieve that in the short-term, at our middle-scale, we can't simply ignore the possibility that other natural systems might have similar capacities for predictive selection.
My naturalist stance is that the only 'goal' or 'plan' about the universe is something like "stable patterns persist" (a necessary tautology requiring no designer and no 'person')

Calilasseia wrote:Oh, and Rumraket, I can't download your .rar file. I keep receiving the message "your download session has expired". E-Mail it to me (my E-Mail address can handle the .rar file if it's less than 10 megs).

Yeah I used a crappy fileshare site apparently. Updated link :

http://www.mediafire.com/?ythwyo2mydm

I should add that propably the best and most detailed description of the function of a polymerase is in the 2001 Structure of the Replicating Complex of a Pol
Family DNA Polymerase- paper.
In fact, the detail to which the authors are able to describe the function of this molecule is better than I had honestly expected.
Check this piece :

The two subdomains of the thumb move in very differ-ent manners in switching from polymerizing to editing modes (Figure 7). While the helices at the base of the thumb rotate by only 7 degrees relative to the palm, the thumb tip rotates 16 degrees away from the palm, and twists 20 degrees away from the exo domain. The DNA remains attached to the thumb tip in this reorientation, with residues 784–790 maintaining contacts to the phos-phates of the primer strand. These are, in fact, the only interactions between the polymerase and the DNA that remain constant between the two modes. With the DNA thus held firmly by the thumb tip, and with the thumb base remaining largely fixed relative to the rest of the polymerase, motion of the DNA comes largely from flex-ing of the hinge region between thumb tip and thumb base (Figure 7). While the transfer of the DNA between polymerizing and editing active sites is probably a pas-presive
diffusion, the thumb domain could guide the DNA on a path between the two sites, constraining the diffu-sion to one dimension and consequently speeding up the transition between editing and polymerizing modes.

I mean... how much more detailed could you possibly demand an account? Quantum-physical electron-cloud propability distributions, atom-by-atom?

EDIT : I added another paper to the rar with an incredibly, even more detailed account of the detailed function of a DNA polymerase : 2001 Structure of the Catalytic Core of S. cerevisiae DNA Polymerase
: Implications for Translesion DNA Synthesis.

I can understand why our gracious host would not want to hear a bad word about his buddy Blehe and IC from the likes of us, so I thought that maybe if fellowfundyfellows like these tell him that he is chewing on a bucket of fail that would be more persuasive :

http://biologos.org/blog/behes-b-cell-b ... ity-fails/

But then I realized that these are only facts, and as such have nothing to do with The Truth.

Shrunk wrote:I think what makes things confusing is that ID does not have a coherent theory of its own, so there is no consistency in the beliefs espoused by its adherents. I'm quite certain the "Baby Jesus fiddling with the genome" scenario I gave is an accurate description of Behe's position. Yet neither he nor the theistic evolutionists would describe Behe as a theistic evolutionist. Of course, he won't describe himself as a creationist, either, even though that is what he is.

To my mind, creationism is defined by the belief that naturalistic processes are not sufficient to have created the diversity of life that exists on earth, that some form of direct intervention by God is required.

As I understand theistic evolution, it accepts standard naturalistic evolutionary theory as is, and only appends the superfluous idea "But God deliberately set in in motion, knowing that it would result in man." That's where the "theistic" part comes in.

I see. Thanks for the info.

Well, Behe has certainly strayed from the concepts laid out in "Of Pandas and People", then.