The argument "we are so complex we must be specifically designed" points exactly to the opposite conclusion.
In a general design sense, more is bad, you want the simplest possible solution because it has less potential problems. And this design principle shows itself in humans too - if you think about it, our genetic code is very badly designed. We suffer from tens of thousands of different health problems. We take it as normal because we haven't seen anything better, but this is not a sign of an intelligent design.
There are also thousands of different species which seem to have solved a lot of our problems, but we don't have these parts of their genetic code. This excludes the possibility that the "designer" didn't know how to solve these problems. If the system was designed, we would have the best possible code, but instead it looks like each different "branch" of the biosphere has focused on different things and "improved" their genetic code independently from the others, exactly as the Evolution model suggests.

xionior wrote:The argument "we are so complex we must be specifically designed" points exactly to the opposite conclusion.
In a general design sense, more is bad, you want the simplest possible solution because it has less potential problems.

Sometimes when creationists say "complex" they actually use it to mean "improbable," which of course is not what it means, but never mind.

And then they calculate this "improbability" the wrong way, but that's another story.

So how's the reading going, Jan_Thomas? Care to share what you've learned?

xionior wrote:The argument "we are so complex we must be specifically designed" points exactly to the opposite conclusion.
In a general design sense, more is bad, you want the simplest possible solution because it has less potential problems. And this design principle shows itself in humans too - if you think about it, our genetic code is very badly designed. We suffer from tens of thousands of different health problems. We take it as normal because we haven't seen anything better, but this is not a sign of an intelligent design.
There are also thousands of different species which seem to have solved a lot of our problems, but we don't have these parts of their genetic code. This excludes the possibility that the "designer" didn't know how to solve these problems. If the system was designed, we would have the best possible code,

Excatly! - just like the Windows operating system ...

but instead it looks like each different "branch" of the biosphere has focused on different things and "improved" their genetic code independently from the others, exactly as the Evolution model suggests.

Jan_Thomas wrote:Call me old fashioned, but "manner maketh man" (Sorry for the genesis-pun) and all that. When someone shouts and ridicules, that makes me a tiny bit suspicious.

You're going to be extremely suspicious of me, then.

something that is by definition unprovable, i.e. GOD.

Is it by definition unprovable? See, I disagree with this, not least because it hasn't been sufficiently well-defined for anything. It isn't anything at all by definition, just some vague notion that people with deficient imaginations have.

Jan_Thomas wrote:however the actual genetic code seems to contain the highest amount of regularities among all candidates

They didn't have to. Here's a fun fact: The decimal expansion of π, if converted by an appropriate conversion algorithm, contains not only all the regularities the authors of this paper found, but all the regularities found in the Bible code, the actual text of their paper, and the bible code, and every bit of written language ever penned by humans, as well.

As Shrunk said, GFL nailed it.

Jan_Thomas wrote:

Shrunk wrote:Hi, Jan_Thomas. Welcome to the group.

I think you'll find the flaws in the paper quite thoroughly dealt with in PZ Myers' article I linked in the OP. Here's the link again:

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ ... /#comments

If there's anything there you're not understanding, I'm sure some of the members here can help clear up your confusion.

Thank you for your welcome!

I have just, with increasing frustration, read through the first 212 posts of this thread.

Which is probably nothing compared with the frustration I've experienced in nearly a decade of dealing with duplicitous creationist apologetics. And I can point to numerous instances where said apologetics is duplicitous, including at least one major instance I dissected in full myself, centred upon outright fabrications and lies peddled about 14C dating.

Jan_Thomas wrote:Disappointingly, the discussion almost imediately derailed from the original topic (shCherbak's paper) and instead concerned ID vs Evolution. This war of ideologies

And at this point, your appraisal is spectacularly wrong. The reason being that this isn't a "war of ideologies", because evolution isn't an "ideology, it's an observed fact accompanied by a scientific theory enjoying massive evidential support. But I'm used to the manner in which creationists, via their duplicitous apologetics, deliberately misrepresent evolution as purportedly constituting a "rival ideology", whilst hoping no one will notice the million or so peer reviewed papers documenting countless thousands of empirical verifications of evolutionary postulates. If memory serves, I've presented but a small sample of those papers here and elsewhere in my time - my current stored collection of papers exceeds 3,000 in number, and I've presented something like 300 of those in full detail.

But of course, one of the other major failings of this particular creationist apologetic fabrication, is that it amounts to a de facto admission on their part, that they are peddling an ideology. Which unravels spectacularly, when the fake "symmetry" they are trying to peddle, to the effect that valid, evidence-based evolutionary biology bears any resemblance whatsoever to their assertion-laden, evidence-free, mythology-based doctrine, is duly exposed as the mendacious fakery it actually is.

Jan_Thomas wrote:I suspect is quite common on this forum.

No, what is "quite common" on this forum, is exposition of apologetic duplicity on the part of creationists and their IDist speciation variants. The mere fact that creationists have to resort to quote mining scientific papers, documentation thereof being voluminous if you search for it, on its own tells you what we're dealing with. Namely, we're dealing with, in many cases, professional liars for doctrine treating science as a branch of apologetics.

Jan_Thomas wrote:Hats off to Rumraket and especially Calilasseia for producing a lot of interesting abstracts and papers regarding code origin / evolution, all in the interest of sober discussion via evidence. You seem to have ample expertise in that field, and I will try to read those abstracts with interest.

Well I don't actually claim to have "expertise" in this field, I merely claim to have paid attention to those that do. A subtle distinction that is sometimes lost upon creationist adversaries.

Jan_Thomas wrote:Sadly, that lenghty discussion with one particularly stubborn creationist slowly but surely degenerated into a heated emotional exchange of the same arguments over and over, with a few insults sprinkled in.

Well I suspect my presentation of numerous canards, and the answers thereto, is something that hasn't yet shown up on the radar of the professional liars for doctrine.

In particular, I have seen nothing suggesting that my own critique of the "design" assertion has come to their attention. Thus far, I have yet to encounter a creationist who actually knows what placing the "design" assertion on a proper, evidentially supported footing actually entails, and for that matter, have yet to see a creationist even acknowledge the existence of that critique. This should be telling you something important about the level of discoursive indolence that doctrinal adherence tends to encourage, whose stark contrast with the diligence exhibited in peer reviewed scientific papers constitutes yet more evidence destroying the "symmetry" apolgetic fabrication.

Jan_Thomas wrote:I wouldn't have had the patience to stay calm for as long as you did. I have now got to the point where the actual co-author of the paper arrived in this thread to steer the discussion back towards his work, not knowing that he was walking into a bar-fight...

Many of us here are veterans of up to a decade's worth of dealing with the usual tropes. Failure to make oneself aware of this is another frequently observed manifestation of the creationist aetiology. In addition, you'll find that at least one of our number, namely GenesForLife, is a tenured professional scientist with a recently published, and very informative, peer reviewed paper to his name.

Jan_Thomas wrote:I fear that your first responses to him reflect the state the discussion was at this point, as he was treated with the same aggressiveness as the ID-guy before him. I'll have to read the rest tomorrow.

Well again, one of the observed manifestations of the aetiology, is a failure to take account of what has been said previously.

Jan_Thomas wrote:

Shrunk wrote:Hi, Jan_Thomas. Welcome to the group.

I think you'll find the flaws in the paper quite thoroughly dealt with in PZ Myers' article I linked in the OP. Here's the link again:

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ ... /#comments

If there's anything there you're not understanding, I'm sure some of the members here can help clear up your confusion.

Shrunk: Thanks for the link. I have had read the article by Myers before coming to this forum, as well as shCherbaks answer which can be found here: http://gencodesignal.info/pz-myers/ . For fairness' sake I recommend reading their answer, too. I must say that Myers - regardless of the actual statements - does not conduct himself very well. He immediately calls the paper garbage, then continues in a tone of childish hyperbole and comes across as hysteric.

Oh dear, the entirely specious trope that presentation style in any way affects the validity of the substantive content. Been there, done that, so often with creationists, I can recognise it in my sleep.

Quite simply, the view that is adopted here by the veterans, myself included, is that ideas are a free-fire zone. There is nothing sacred about ideas. As a corollary, those of us encountering ideas we know to be bad, feel no obligation to cosset them in discoursive cotton wool. Indeed, we are aware that science, when done properly, consists of testing ideas to destruction, and as such, is an excellent method for applying that other popular maxim here, namely bad ideas exist to be destroyed, not least because history offers us voluminous evidence of what happens when bad ideas are allowed to persist, and the corpses that frequently result therefrom.

As an additional corollary, we regard tone policing with much the same level of contempt as we regard the bad ideas we subject to discoursive ordnance.

Jan_Thomas wrote:This makes it hard to judge his criticism on an objective level.

Why should this be the case, for anyone with functioning language comprehension?

Indeed, I find frequently that barbed humour is often an aid to enlightenment. Hence the existence of satire.

Jan_Thomas wrote:Concerning the actual statements: He seems to confuse the authors of the paper with creationist ID-proponents. Their actual agenda is the possibility of panspermia.

Having seen some expositions on this very subject from actual scientists, who then go on to provide detailed reasons why certain versions thereof are untenable, I think I have paid sufficient attention to those in the know, to work out what is being said. For example, scientists are perfectly prepared to accept that certain relatively simple molecules were donated from space, courtesy of the considerable body of evidence supporting this (e.g., the Murchison meteorite, which upon spectroscopic analysis, was found to contain a wide range of molecules of biological import, after due diligence to avoid contamination was observed). However, there remains a large amount of doubt as to whether organisms could have survived long periods in space, followed by atmospheric re-entry. And I post this whilst being aware of the experiments involving tardigrades in Earth orbit, though even someone with only an elementary science education should be able to work out the difference between surviving in space for 30 days, and surviving in space for several million years.

Jan_Thomas wrote:Nowhere in the paper do they propose a higher being as the magical creator of life. This is not the intention. The paper discusses the possibility of a pattern inside the genetic code that cannot be explained by todays theories of code evolution AND shows signs of artificiality.

Once again, I'm tempted to ask if these authors genuinely have a proper, rigorous metric, for determining manufacture by an intelligence as opposed to natural synthesis. The reason I ask being that I'm aware of how the development of such a metric would be instant Nobel Prize material. Whoever genuinely succeeded in this endeavour would be hailed as a genius in every peer reviewed journal on the planet. That this hasn't happened to the authors, is informative here.

Jan_Thomas wrote:My own opinion of the shCerbak paper and Myers answer will have to wait till I've read the entire thread. I will not, however, start calling the authors "another set of Intelligent Design creationists in Kazakhstan" that are "wanking over tables".

Well I for one am aware of the need to distinguish rigorously between mere coincidence, pareidolia and genuine evidence for an interesting process. Which is what countless thousands of scientists strive to achieve in their everyday work.

Jan_Thomas wrote:

Shrunk wrote:If I may ask, why are you spending so much time trying to grok this worthless article? Aren't there any more worthwhile publications you could be reading? You really think these guys have found scientific proof of God, and no one has noticed?

Good question. Why does everybody think shCherbak's paper has anything to do with god?

Well we're intimately aware of how a paper like this will be seized upon by the creationist apologetics brigade like a shot. Which is one reason why biologists have learned to exercise a certain level of diligence with respect to their output, having had their fingers burned by quote mining.

Jan_Thomas wrote: - I have an interest in astronomy. I have a big interest in SETI. I am not very religious.
- As a human being, I feel a deep interest in the question of how life originated. I want to know where we come from.

I have close to 300 papers on abiogenesis in my collection you can read that will be informative here.

Jan_Thomas wrote:These guys do not say they found a proof of god. They say they may have found indication for directed panspermia, a concept that has been around for decades and discussed by, among others, Francis Crick.

Once again, any genuine evidence for this would be Nobel worthy.

Plus, this merely pushes back the question to asking about the origin of the "directors" of said "directed panspermia". At some point, there has to be a first life form that wasn't the product thereof, because no antecedent life forms existed to perform the "directing". How did that life form arise? At some point, one has to ask what role testable natural processes, completlely devoid of any "direction" by any "intelligence", took place. There is no escape from this. The only other option on the table, apart from testable natural processes amenable to empirical investigation and analysis, is the sort of magic asserted to take place in mythology, and there are numerous compelling reasons why that option is a non-starter, not least the fact that one of the implications of certain supernaturalist assertions being true, is that science as we know it would be impossible.

Jan_Thomas wrote:Combining the above, this paper intrigued me very much. I think it derserves scrutiny. Should these guys be right, the implications would be immense. Should they be wrong, at least reading the part about the ideogram was a truly magnificient piece of science fiction.

I think you may have found the paper's actual genre.