Correction: They are very well informed in the sciences according to the opinion of Bill Cole. And we can all figure out what that is worth.
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If ID were real science you could find these papers. This is why we disagree with ID proponents when they say ID is scientific.
You are assuming that design is necessarily supernatural.
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Here is a point of common ground as we agree evolutionary theory does not explain everything. What do you think it does explain to the level we can test the individual hypotheses?
How would you show that it is false? How well versed are you in population genetic models? Are you aware that some of the evidence looks very convincing until you scratch below the surface.
I agree there are weaknesses to Dembski’s argument however there are many interesting ideas he has surfaced. Behe is the guy that convinced me that ID had some value for the sciences. I agree with you that it is used for apologetics and I was resistant to it at first but I now believe it is a very useful tool for science.
Each person is born with 50 to 100 mutations. For any single person, the chances of getting 100 specific mutations is 1 in 18 billion (6 billion bases in the genome, 3 possible snp’s per loci) to the 100th power, or 3.36x10^1025. That’s the outcome of a random process, and you would claim that it is designed. In fact, using your criteria, any real random process would be detected as designed.
Every single human genome we see is improbable, yet they are formed naturally all of the time.
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Facts are not voted on. The Earth would not flatten out if a majority of the public suddenly believed the Earth was flat.
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What pattern of SNP’s does ID predict with respect to transitions, transversions, and CpG mutations, and why?
What pattern of sequence conservation does ID predict for exons and introns, and why?
What pattern does ID predict for sequence divergence in the LTR’s of orthologous ERV’s, and why?
The problem scientists have with ID is that there is no way to start from the first principles of ID and answer these types of questions, of which there are many. There are very real pieces of evidence and observations, and ID seems to ignore them, or have no answer for why they exist.
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Hi T
I agree ID is limited in what it explains.
Where it is useful is identifying where there may be limits to what science can figure out. It is also useful as a framework to explore science. Coming at a problem from a design perspective is very different then coming at a problem from a lucky accident or blind and unguided perspective.
ID would claim that we can’t shuffle a deck of cards and lay them out one by one because the ensuing order of cards is beyond what they claim can be done through random processes. This is why scientists disagree with ID.
I would agree. The latter is scientific and the former is not.
On top of that, no theory in science is based solely on the denial of competing theories. Any theory needs to stand on its own, and ID does not.
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Very different indeed. For example, it leads to no understanding, no new questions, no further science. God did it, I believe it, that settles it. Or perhaps you can point to the wildly fruitful ID research programs that must surely exist?
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Let’s look at a problem in 2 different ways.
!. The ubiquitin system (eukaryotic regulatory system) was a lucky accident.
2. The ubiquitin system was purposefully designed.
Would there be any difference here in how we might make discoveries?
I don’t think that the difficulties in working out the details of past evolution - where direct evidence of the course taken is unavailable - should be considered a count against evolution.
Evolution does a very good job of explaining the patterns we find in life, including some that would seem extremely odd if we assumed design.
Ignoring evidence known to Darwin, there’s Darwin’s own test - find features that exist only for the benefit of other species. Or finding fossils grossly out of place. Or if the genetic evidence had revealed clear divisions, ruling out common descent from simpler ancestors.
Weaknesses understates it, Dembski himself was unable to use his own Design Inference, specifications are too weak a constraint (as he later recognised) and the purely eliminative nature of the argument is error prone - and fails to capture how we usually identify “design” - which was one of his goals.
And for that he got called “the Isaac Newton of Information Theory”.
I don’t see how that can be seen as anything other than a black mark against ID.
The fact that ID is not useful enough to come up with an alternative theory is a pretty serious problem. And from reports here when you “scratch the surface” of Behe’s arguments, major errors appear. In fact it was Behe’s endorsement of Well’s mendacious Icons of Evolution that convinced me that ID was not serious about science, Apologetics and dirty politics were the real focus,
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No. We could discover nothing in the first case because it’s a silly straw-man hypothesis, and we could discover nothing in the second case because it’s the seal of all investigation.
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Amen! If Behe were serious about science, there is no way in the world he would associate himself with such nasty garbage as that. And that’s not the only ridiculous book he’s endorsed!
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I agree it explains some of the patterns we see. The question in my mind is how many origin events(of life) are there. I think the evidence is very strong there is more then one.
Here is a diagram that challenges common descent by natural means vs common descent with the support of Devine changes.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12111#citeas
The changes here that are difficult to explain are the different gene patterns. This magnitude of changes is inconsistent with current population genetic models.
I agree ID is limited but all scientific theories are limited. The most important issue is if it is useful.
Gene deletion is not that hard to explain.
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Only if you Beg the Question, by first assuming that species cannot bifurcate and evolve.
Or, to put it another way, it does not challenge “common descent by natural means” as scientists understand it, but rather Bill Cole’s Potemkin Common Descent™.
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I don’t think that’s true at all. The roots of the tree of life are tangled - and very hard to get a picture of, but that’s the only place where multiple origins are plausible.
Aside from the fact that your link goes to a paper and not whichever diagram you mean to reference you will have to be more specific about the supposed problem. Also, since such a finding would be rather dramatic I find it very odd that the paper you have linked to doesn’t make that the headline claim - perhaps you linked to the wrong paper?
The point is that ID seems far, far more limited than a scientific theory, and as a result is far less useful.
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You have repeatedly made this claim, and never once supported it.
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ABSTRACT
We conclude the ubiquitin system was purposefully designed.
INTRODUCTION
Ubiquitin is ubiquitous in eukaryotic organisms…
…2 pages describing ubiquitin…
METHODS AND MATERIALS
None required.
DISCUSSION
It appears that ubiquitin was purposefully designed. It would be interesting to investigate who designed ubiquitin, and the mechanism of instantiating this design. That, however, lies beyond the scope of this paper.
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You mean a diagram that simply shows the number of genes that evolved after they split from their common ancestors. There’s nothing about that which contradicts or is incompatible with common descent.
Not difficult to explain. New genes evolve from non-coding DNA.
That is a bold-faced lie and you know it.
Neither is gain, whether by divergence, gene-fusion, or de novo from non-coding DNA.
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