Is there actual scientific evidence to support Intelligent Design "theory?"

DNA is just molecules and chemistry.

The vast majority of mutations are neutral ("not negative"), and as long as an organism survives, it can be passed to its offspring. There is no requirement for them to be purely positive changes in order to be passed on. It is also possible for multiple neutral changes to later "combine" to become either negative or advantageous.

Not true. Whether or not a change is positive is relative to its environment. Take an organism that lives underground or in a cave, for example. A mutation that increases hearing ability would be beneficial even if that change also negatively affects its visual acuity, since that organism would be required to rely on audio queues over visual due to the lack of light.

Over 3.5 billion years isn't enough time?

Of course it does. The time it takes for a change to propagate through a population depends on the size of the population. You seem to be focused on the idea where much of a population is killed off, and the remaining organisms of that species repopulate the gap. But that's only one scenario, there are many others - for example, an extinction event where a species is entirely killed off and a separate species fills that niche, or allopatric speciation, where populations of the same species become isolated from each other.

It's still possible even in your scenario. Say there is a population of rabbits, where the environment becomes a bit colder. This could be devastating, killing off much of the population. However, there is a lineage with a mutation that provides heavier/thicker fur, keeping them warmer. Now, you are correct that the total allele diversity of the population has dropped, but there are now significantly fewer rabbits competing for resources causing this localized population of rabbits to explode, all containing the "better" (for that environment) fur mutation.

False. There is no "end" to work toward. Mutations are entirely random. Natural selection is not random, though there is still no "goal" to reach. Organisms better suited to their environment simply have a better chance to survive and pass on their mutation(s).

Insulation and sexual selection are two very good reasons.

Nonsense. This basically boils down to an argument from ignorance. All evidence confirms that modern synthesis is correct (the term for our current theory of evolution). There is not a single shred of evidence that indicates otherwise. Not only is there also a complete lack of evidence for a designer, but it is completely superfluous and unnecessary. Everything works without one.

 

If this is what you think then you have no idea what i wrote, or what any of it means.

Your claim that there is a "science" about the "information" is what is wishful thinking.

You seem unable to address my question about "information" in a hydrogen atom, or in anything else I said even thou you redacted it down to 3 lines.

A vague undefined concept like "information' is not useful in science.

 

ahh yes, the Conspiracy.

The word game is on the part of those who play equivocation and use vague meaningless words.

In science words have to have a specific agreed upon meaning. There is an actual reason for that.

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Do they teach alchemy too?

Do you know why alchemy and creationism dont stand a chance?

 

It's neither vague nor undefined. You can ignore this an the 50 other peer reviewed scientific papers on it, but it doesn't make it go away.


"The author emphasizes a distinction between “order” and “organization,” arguing that self-ordered structures like whirlpools are readily constructed by natural processes, but “have never been observed to achieve 1) programming, 2) computational halting, 3) creative engineering, 4) symbol systems, 5) language, or 6) bona fide organization” -- all hallmarks of living organisms. In contrast, living organisms are built upon programming and are highly organized, but “physicodynamics alone cannot organize itself into formally functional systems requiring algorithmic optimization, computational halting, and circuit integration.” His solution offers a positive argument for design: “No known natural process exists that spontaneously writes meaningful or functional syntax. Only agents have been known to write meaningful and pragmatic syntax.” He notes that the kind of “sophisticated formal function” found in life “consistently requires regulation and control,” but “Control always emanates from choice contingency and intentionality, not from spontaneous molecular chaos.”

David L. Abel, “The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Vol. 10:247-291 (2009).

 

Reports on what?

This? ..

this?....

this?....“

I dont think so.

you are quoting a book review, not a peer reviewed article, supported by 50 other such.

 

RATWIK


[edit]Information theory and genetics, evolution, and development

The relationship between biology and information theory given above and other approaches in the literature suggest that the words "biological information", "developmental information" or "genetic information" are ambiguous without clarification. Even then, there will be ambiguity:
“”In biology the term information is used with two very different meanings. The first is in reference to the fact that the sequence of bases in DNA codes for the sequence of amino acids in proteins. In this restricted sense, DNA contains information, namely about the primary structure of proteins. The second use of the term information is an extrapolation: it signifies the belief or expectation that the genome somehow also codes for the higher or more complex properties of living things. It is clear that the second type of information, if it exists, must be very different from the simple one-to-one cryptography of the genetic code. This extrapolation is based, loosely, on information theory. But to apply information theory in a proper and useful way it is necessary to identify the manner in which information is to be measured (the units in which it is to be expressed in both sender and receiver, and the total amount of information in the system and in a message), and it is necessary to identify the sender, the receiver and the information channel (or means by which information is transmitted). As it is, there exists no generally accepted method for measuring the amount of information in a biological system, nor even agreement of what the units of information are (atoms, molecules, cells?) and how to encode information about their number, their diversity, and their arrangement in space and time.[9]
[edit]Creationist information theory

Creationists, in an attempt to coat their myths with a veneer of science, have co-opted the idea of information theory to use as a plausible-sounding attack on evolution. Essentially, the claim is that the genetic code is like a language and thus transmits information, and in part due to the usual willful misunderstandings of the second law of thermodynamics (which is about energy, not information), they maintain that information can never be increased.[10] Therefore, the changes they cannot outright deny are defined as "losing information", while changes they disagree with are defined as "gaining information", which by their definition is impossible. Note that at no point do creationists actually specify what information actually is and often will purposefully not define the concept. The creationists tend to change their meaning on an ad hoc basis depending on the argument, relying on colloquial, imprecise definitions of information rather than quantifiable ones -- or worse, switching interchangeably between different definitions depending on the context of the discussion or argument.
[edit]Dr. Werner Gitt and In the Beginning was Information
Understanding that information theory has a relationship to genetics and evolution, creationists have used the language of information theory in an attempt to discredit evolution. Dr. Werner Gitt published a monograph In the Beginning was Information[11] that creationists invariably refer to when arguing about information theory and evolution. Gitt's book is problematic in its structure and in its assertions about information theory.
Gitt separates the scientific version of information from other types. He singles out Shannon information as "statistical" and then partitions information into syntax, semantic (or "meaningful") information, pragmatic information, and apobetics. In doing so, he makes a number of claims about how genetics works. The text develops a number of statements which Gitt numbers as "theorems", as if the text were a mathematics textbook, and claims "[this] series of theorems which should also be regarded as laws of nature, although they are not of a physical or a chemical nature."
This form of argument is problematic on multiple accounts. First, theorems are usually mathematical statements based on postulates and definitions and take the form of propositional logic to prove such statements. Gitt does not state his assumptions and leaves many terms undefined. More problematically, the theorems themselves are not mathematical statements; his theorems are actually assertions. (His binning of Shannon information as statistical and the "lowest level" of information indicates Gitt's disdain for mathematics.) Second, theorems are the result of deductive logic, while scientific laws are the result of inductive logic based on observation. The two cannot be equated. Gitt does not refer to any observation in the development of his theorems, and hence, by definition they are not laws.[12] It is unclear how to make statements about the natural world without any observation to support it. Third, as will be described below, it is an untestable model and hence cannot be deemed valid or invalid.
In essence, Gitt uses the language of mathematics and science, but does not perform a mathematical proof or employ the scientific method. Instead, he makes a number of assertions that cannot be validated, and Gitt's text is a poorly constructed rhetorical argument, not a scientific one.
[edit]Semantic or meaningful information
At the heart of Gitt's text is the concept of meaningful information. Gitt does not define semantic information, but instead he relies on references to hieroglyphics, language, computer programs. Hence, he generalizes in his theorems concepts of linguistics into genetics that are unjustified. Essentially, Gitt conflates concepts of the informal definition of information (such as knowledge in a book) with that of information theory to provide statements assertions meaningless to genetics. His statements provide examples.
"There can be no information without a sender." It is certainly true in the case of books and writing that a human entity must have written or typed the original source. A reasonably educated person has observed other people writing, and has written him or herself. However, applying that generalization to genetics is problematic. An intelligent source has never been observed to create a genetic code naturally, nor is there any inferential evidence that this occurs. (The only exception is, of course, scientists in the laboratory who have only recently done so.) To assume that there must be a sender or an intelligent source of information cannot be validated.
"It is impossible for information to exist without having been established voluntarily by a free will." Again, this makes sense in the case of writing, books, and computer programs because we observe others generating this type of information (or have ourselves). There is no evidence that during procreation a supernatural being is deciding which genes to pass on, or was the original source of a genetic code.
Books, language and computer programs do at times provide useful analogies to genetic information, but they are not relevantly similar when comparing their origin, and not every statement about information in books or computer programs can be generalized to genetic information.
[edit]Statements on evolution
Gitt concludes the following about evolution:
“”We find proposals for the way the genetic code could have originated, in very many publications [e. g. O2, E2, K1]. But up to the present time nobody has been able to propose anything better than purely imaginary models. It has not yet been shown empirically how information can arise in matter, and, according to Theorem 11, this will never happen.
"Theorem" 11 (deduced without postulates or definitions) states that.......

you can keep claiming "science" and "peer support" and only reading what suits you but it wont make
ID real.

 

creationism(let's call id what it really is) is an excuse for being stupid...imagine receiving a degree in biology with only one class, one exam, one question on the exam the answer being "god did it" , correct! Pick up your degree on your way out...

 

if they want detail you can just make up whatever you like

 

Dont forget in astrology and conjuring...sounds like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

 

exactly, run into something you can't explain, "goddidit"...a problem you can't solve, "goddidit"...

Ask which god and they'll insist there is only a single god because just the way it is...

 

No objective scientific review of ID would include the statement, "Creationists, in an attempt to coat their myths with a veneer of science."

That should've been your first clue you were reading something extremely biased.

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That would be like looking at Mt. Rushmore and proclaiming, "Wind and erosion did it."

 

If you decide something is designed because it LOOKS designed to you, you are assuming a conclusion. I wrote (and you ignored) that people sent Dembski plenty of things and asked if they were designed. Since he couldn't tell by looking, he simply never responded!

But what you are doing here is drawing a distinction between "designed" and "random", and that's not valid. You can think of evolution as being a design mechanism, in the sense that it is directional, it rewards and punishes, it makes "intelligent" decisions, and as a result it produces organisms very well suited for their environments. This does not happen "by chance". Evolution may be a slow and inefficient designer, but over time it's a very effective designer.

The usual error lies in thinking that if we see obvious design in nature (and we do), that some human-type entity must have intentionally put it there, using a human design process., There is neither any necessity for this, nor any evidence of this. Instead, evolutionary processes fully explain the designs we see in nature.

 

That is true, and actually I have considerable skill at detecting such. Nothing from a creosite is anything but heavily biased of course, but you do go to them.

Doesnt mean what they say isnt true, of course, in either case.

do you have something closer to 50 scientific papers supporting ID / information than a book review?

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A river drainage system is not designed but it sure is not random.

 

As you illustrate, when we start getting into the really convoluted creationist misrepresentations, the number of different misleading meanings they can attach to words is depressing. Lizzie Liddle, talking to Dembski when he had a blog, pointed out that according to Dembsi's own definition, evolution is an intelligent designer. She was banned from the blog for doing so, of course. In fact, Dembski was unable to come up with a single definition of intelligence that didn't either allow evolution, or disallow his own explanatory filter and CSI boondoggle. And after that, he vanished.

But as badly as "design" has been distorted, that's nothing compared with "random". In fact, "random" is a gnarly mathematical concept, wedded as it is to the concept of a probability distribution space. It is not an objective quantity or attribute, it is a statement that X fails to correlate with Y under condition Z. The creationist approach, of course, is NEVER to specify X, Y, or Z, but rather to use "random" the same way they use "information" - to mean whatever they hope their audience thinks it probably means in the context misrepresented by the creationists.

 

"Intelligent Design Theory" is an unintelligent reworking of Renee Descartes's 17th century "proof" of God's existence by means of the First Cause argument. You theologians will recall that Descartes said everything has a cause, so if you followed the chain of causality back in time you must eventually find a First Cause, and that First Cause was God. Tah-dah! What Descartes overlooked was that he contradicted his own premise. If everything has a cause, you can't suppose the existence of an uncaused First Cause. So either God has a cause and is not God, or a cause is not necessary. If we can suppose God existed without a cause, then we might suppose that of anything.

"Intelligent Design" is the same fallacy. Its followers say the vast complexity of nature proves the existence of an intelligent designer (a First Cause, so to speak). But then who designed the designer? If God can exist without having been designed, then so can nature.

Descartes' error was already understood in the 18th century, yet here it is again. Stupidity is nothing if not predictable.

 

I never got past calculus so I let discusisons of math be carried on by those who will.

I do know enough to know that creo-random means something like willy-nilly, as in trying to make a 747 (so far not updated to 787) by throwing parts at eachother, and that there is a lot more to it than that.

Order being generated by "chaos" or "randomness"is so easy to demonstrate, but we keep hearing how it cant happen!

Earlier I suggested that a capable god ought to be able to set off the BB, having designed the properties of all that he created,in such a way that it could run itself
without a lot of tinkering later on to keep it running. Why not?

If you read that, and the rather weirdly inappropriate response,you'd notice that they didnt get what I meant, atl Thought I was insulting god? To me tho, it seems belittling to portray god as someone who does have to micromanage to keep things running.

I mean, if you are going to believe in god, show some respect!

 

In this case, it's not all that difficult. Creationists assume what's called a flat probability space, meaning that all outcomes are equally likely. But that's rarely the case. If you were to take a step in a random direction, this does not mean you will end up in a random location. In fact, you'll end up one step from where you were.

Ah, here we have another misleading false assumption. Every time you throw parts around, you end up with a configuration which is no less likely than the 747 configuration. This is called the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy - that you shoot first, then draw the bullseye around wherever the bullet hit. So now we combine this fallacy with the misuse of "design" and the misuse of "random" and the careful omission of selection, and we're halfway to creationland.

 

DAMN HIM!!!

DAMN ABOVE ALPHA TO HELL!!!

DR. ZEUS DR. ZEUS?

AboveAlpha

 

If that's the case, apparently you're like most people in that respect.

Obviously that figure came outa somebody's ass, since it's impossible to compute meaningful probabilities without knowledge of all the possibilities, which you obviously don't have if you can't call your theory a fact.

 

It is not possible to find any evidence for a non reiterating event. Science extracts rules out of repeated observations of effects. That rule is the "scientific theory". Science then tries to control the conditions under which the effect theoretically should occur and tries to reproduce it. The theory then is regarded to be proven. For a single effect every explanation is pure speculation. Take thunder and lightning. Imagine to have been the first one to see and hear it together with a few others. Person Nr. 1 assumes it to be produced by some deity and climbs on a hill to search the god of thunder. Person Nr. 2 thinks it has to do with darkness and keeps awake every night to see the effect. Person 3 assumes it has to do with rain and wind and seeks those conditions to see the effect. After Nr.1 has found his god on the mountain, Nr. 2 is awake all night and Nr.3 stands in the rain, they all need at least one more repetition of the effect as confirmation of the hypothesis. The more repetitions occur, the better they can "fine tune" their hypothesis until they are able to reproduce a giant spark. With a single effect like "creation" it is the same. It cannot be proven and simple logic is against the hypothesis.of creation It is one of many justified questions why "god" does not continue to create something. With so much complaints he obviously has about his products (ourselves in particular), everyone with a little bit of logic thinking in his brain just would create something else. Why does "God" waste his time to curse and punish his defective creationist prototypes? That behavior is the antithesis to "intelligent". When the designer is a dud, the "design" cannot be intelligent, so is the product. On the other side some similar objections (to my opinion) can be held against the theory of evolution. Evolution theoretically follows physical and chemical laws. Step by step from early primitive more sophisicated life forms evolve. The problem is: those laws are valid on every step of the ladder. This means we should observe a continous flow of primitive life forms evolving into higher ones. Correct me if I am wrong, but that seems not to be the case. "Evolution" seems to be a "living being" itself. Climbing on the next (higher) step makes it forgetting the lower ones. That is also not logic. Perhaps there is a third explanation or a missing piece which has been overlooked. One thing is certain however: the likelihood that something like evolution occurred is Millions of times higher than the possibility of "creation". As long as it is not experimentally proven however, it is one theory among many others. Any theory being likely or not, there is no reason to laugh about those believing in another.

 

What "laws"? Please name them.

We "should"? Why is that? Nobody in science seems to think that.

"Evolution seems to be a living being'? How it seems to you isnt too relevant to the realities of it.

Please explain what you men by this. No metaphors please.

Your use of the word "proven" suggests that you think a theory can be proven. is that the case?

There actually isnt any other theory.
In general Id agree that its inappropriate to laugh at and discourage ideas.

The falsehoods and stupidities, ignorance and absurdities that are put forward to try to disprove evolution by creationists,tho, are not worthy of any respect.

 

Yes and no.

No scientific theory is ever regarded as proven. Strongly supported, yes, but never proven. There is always the possibility that tomorrow's observations will require the theory to be amended, modified, or extended.

This is simply not so. Nearly all such "single effects" fall into a well-explained CLASS of similar effects. One need not drop every object in existence to establish and measure gravity within some gravitational field, nor does one need to do this in every possible gravitational field to understand and explain fields in general.

Actually, with knowledge of electicity, voltage differentials, storm potentials, etc. one can actually predict the occurrence of lightning even if nobody has ever seen it before.

This is equivocation. "God" is not a hypothesis, it's an admission of ignorance. Supernatural creation is the same - we don't know where X came from, we know it had to come from somewhere, we demand an explanation, so we Make One Up. But to be a hypothesis, a proposal must be testable at least in principle. If it cannot be tested, it is not a hypothesis. It is an excuse.

My pleasure. The vast majority of mutations are neutral. Indeed, most of them are just DNA synonym-shuffling without phenotypic effect. Most mutations that have phenotypic effect are neutral with respect to adaptation. About half of those that might affect reproductive success ("selectable" mutations) make organisms simpler, and about half make them more complex. There is no bias in favor of complexity. There is no ladder. We should observe a continuous flow of life forms evolving into other similar life forms. "Higher" and "lower" are not meaningful concepts in evolution. A trilobite was no less complex than a rabbit.

There are no steps, there is no higher or lower. There is only steady change. Your model is incorrect.

No, you can't say this. You can say that evolution is observed and the mechanisms have largely been identified and tested, so it's a viable, useful explanation. Creation has never been observed, no mechanisms have ever even been suggested, much less tested, so it's semantic noise, unrelated to anything observed in reality. That's a different category altogether, and you can't compare probabilities.

There is no such thing as empirical proof. The closest it's possible to come is strong supporting evidence.

If "it" is the theory of evolution, it is not "one theory among others". It has been well over a century since any competing theory has even been suggested. The base of evidence is simply too extensive anymore for that to happen. There are no other theories.

If "it" refers to creation, that's not a theory. Theories rest on substantial foundations of TESTED hypotheses, and the evidence these tests have produced. Pulling meaningless terms out of your anus does NOT constitute a theory. Sorry.

You need to understand what a theory is, which you don't. Once you understand (and we're talking about scientific theories here, not the vernacular notion of any guess, speculation, or hunch that crosses your mind), you will see that we DO NOT have competing theories here. We have a VERY solidly attested, long-standing theory, and we have religious rejection of that theory, NOT on the basis of evidence (ALL of which supports the scientific theory), but on the firm conviction that evidence is meaningless and doesn't matter.

 

There does NOT exist a single tiny bit of empirical evidence that would support Intelligent Design.

Anyone that states there is....please post such data.

I know they cannot.....as one cannot post what does not exist.

AboveAlpha