Yes. In both cases the one who hasn’t flown hasn’t proved he can fly.
We knew it was a pseudoscience before I asserted it to be so. We know it’s a pseudoscience because it hasn’t demonstrated the least of its claims.
I don’t recall what Dseid said, but your post didn’t make any sense. Your condescending quality doesn’t add any coherence to your posts.
It wasn’t a statement of your position, it was a challenge to clarify your position by stating a proposition central to ID that is falisifiable. I understand your reluctance to do so, because it’s much easier to keep insisting on “predictions” made by ID without explaining why those predictions came directly from a necessity of belief in an intelligent designer.
[qupte]Ah I see. It’s Core Scotsman. 
[/quote]
Ah. I see it’s the “I’m going to keep making references to logical things I’ve read about it and don’t understand” fallacy.
Well, it isn’t. But if you can give me an example of a prediction that was dependent upon intelligent design I will accept it.
It was an apt analogy in the context used.
Which was exactly my point. If you set out to prove you can’t fly without your wings, you haven’t proven you can fly with your wings, or that you have wings, and you haven’t made a prediction essential to your claim that you can fly.
Neither the history nor the philosophy of science has never been a strong point for me. But Blake has really put an interesting spin on this whole ID thing for me.
This thread shouldn’t mention Darwin at all. There is nothing in ID that argues against (or for) Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin couldn’t have known whether it was random DNA hits or angels flipping switches for God in each cell. The issue here lies in the Modern Synthesis, and specifically in one aspect of the it – random mutation.
In my mind (correct me if I’m wrong here), ID boils down to a pretty technical argument on the origin of genic variation. We watch mutation happen by random chance all the time (just ask Bridges and Morgan about the white mutation in Drosophila). The ID theory that Blake seems to be posing is that amongst all the noise of the certainly observable and understandable random mutation, is there a tiny hint of something bigger at work? For instance, is it possible that an angel/God/IPU is shooting cosmic ray photons at the chromosome 17 of hominid testes causing a mutation in the enhancer of a EGF receptor which will cause an overgrowth of the cerebral cortex that will eventually lead to man? Or for the cheek size, pigmentation, and gamete formation genes that separate Drosophila melanogaster from Drosophila simulans?
With all this genome sequencing we’ve (and, erm, I’ve) done, to my knowledge, we’ve never found any]evidence of this – nothing bizarre that we couldn’t explain by standard molecular genetics. Nothing like whole de novo segments of genes inserted into the genomes of two closely related species. In fact, the things separating closely related species are actually pretty mundane – genome reorganization, scattershot random mutation, etc. I got a PhD on this so perhaps I consider myself knowledgeable.
As it stands with this definition, ID isn’t a scientific concept because it doesn’t put any meatballs out there for falsification. It turns into the Popperian “prove there are no black swans since all the swans on the lake are white” issue. Sure we can look at the genomes of mice v. rats or Saccharomyces or Drosophila genomes or even chimps v. humans. Just because we don’t find anything that looks odd doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. Or that angels are using the tools of random mutagenesis to evolve species. In this sense, it ain’t a theory and is meaningless
OTOH, if I understand Blake right, ID really does want to go out there and find out these steps of irreducible complexity and show that they are distinguishable from random mutation. That would be really freakin’ cool, and pretty easily falsifiable. Interestingly, a theory such as this becomes profoundly areligious, as it takes faith right out of the picture, and replaces it with a now scientifically definable entity. Which I can imagine would be a huge letdown for most of the people actually pushing for ID in schools right now.
Blake is wrong in saying that we have no way of classifying much of the speciation events. The science of comparative genome sequencing is being applied throughout the tree of life and we are becoming surrounded by these data, the exact record of how species branched and speciated. You know, maybe we find a unique gene cassette inserted in specific genes involved in the speciation of rodents, primates, jellyfish, and bacteria in a non-random fashion. ID, if it dares put a meatball out like a common designer using a common mechanism for speciation, will probably be quickly falsified and tossed onto the trashheap. Methinks this ain’t what the Discovery Institute is pressing for.
Moreover, the theory, as I understand Blake presents it, starts to be a pretty technical point on the origin of variation, not on the actual theory of evolution. As to that, I wonder why it would ever be broached in anything less than an advanced college course.
I’d like to ask Blake to move from the abstract to the concrete. He keeps saying that ID is scientific, in some abstract sense, but let’s examine the key elements of ID concretely.
Irreducible complexity. As I said earlier, this is a critique of science, not science itself. It amounts to an assertion that an observation is too complex to understand, therefore it must (and must is the key term here) be due to an “intelligent designer”. That is simply a failure to pursue naturalistic causes; amounting to throwing one’s hands in the air and saying “I give up”. That is NOT science.
Intelligent Designer: Postulating some unknown designer is a fine hypothesis, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. What characteristics does this designer have that superceded naturalistic causes? What are the essential characteristics of this designer? If it is capable of creating “irreducible complexity” does the designer contain no elements of this “irreducible complexity” itself? How did this designer come into being, if not by natural causes? And if we are, in fact, the end product of this designer, then we need only take evolution by natural selection and apply it to the designer, unless one wants to postulate yet another proto-designer who designed the designer. Unfortunately, sooner or later one must either confront the idea of a desinger arising out of random process, or one must postulate a supernatural being, apart from natural process, as the ultimate designer. And that is where science ends and religion begins.
This brings me back to the question,Can the designer exist outside of existance? In my way of thinking, a designer suggests a being, doesn’t a being first need a place to be?Where did that place come from, and what or who, created the place? Just questions that keep popping up when I hear these discussions. Such thoughts keep me interested in the scientific view that what came first is still unknown.
One can believe there was a creator, but it cannot be proven, just accepted on Faith alone.
Monavis
Assuming ID was true, what is the evidence for a single designer?
I would disagree that ID and the modern evolutionary synthesis are so inextricably intwined. As a point of fact, the proposition of ID proponents is not simply that a designer was involved, but that one is required. The complexity of many systems (be they behaviors, structures, or whatever) – according to them – is too great to be explained by “mere” accumulation of natural selection. There exist, then, such structures which must have been designed, and that finding evidence of such structures is evidence for a designer.
I am on record in these fora as having stated that I do not find ID to be unscientific in theory. We have tinkered in genetic engineering for s few decades, and have dabbled in artificial selection for countless generations. Therefore, there is certainly some “intelligent design” occurring. The trick is in coming up with a method whereby our products can be reliably differentiated from “natural” ones (e.g., differentiating GMOs from natural ones, or detecting an organism that is the product of artificial, vs natural, selection). From a purely academic standpoint, then, there is merit to being able to detect ID, and as such, the process can probably be made to be scientific.
But, really, I think that a case can be made that Behe’s “irreducible complexity” is a scientific statement. If a case can be found whereby accumulated selection cannot fully explain the current state of a trait, and, indeed, that the trait in question cannot be the product of such accumulated selection, then there may well be evidence that, if not necessarily an intelligent designer, something beyond our current knowledge is (or was) at work. Such a find will not, however, verify that the “designer” was necessarily the Judeo-Christian God.
I still don’t understand how you prove that a trait couldn’t be caused by accumulated selection. All you can show is that we can’t figure out all the details, which is an entirely different thing. The fact that “we don’t know how this came about” does not lead one to the conclusion that “a designer did it”. Of course there is always the possibility that a designer did it, but unless there is real, positive evidence, that hypothesis is just a wild guess.
Occam’s Razor? (Simpler to posit one designer than several.)
Darwin’s Finch: Ignore that last post of mine. I misread your post, and re-reading it now I see that I don’t disagree with you in any substative way. Sorry for the confusion.
Been kind of following along in the thread and don’t really have much substantial to add. But I saw this article and just thought I’d drop it in.
-XT
xtstime’s post made it sound to me like Harvard’s research is ID-centered. (I doubt this was intentional).
In any case, it’s not.
No, it wasn’t intentional. I was just posting some snippets from the article in keeping with the board rules. I didn’t mean to give the impression that Harvard was a pro-ponent of ID. :smack: Sorry 'bout that.
-XT
That’s OK. I got you back by grossly misrepresenting your username.
Also, note that the Harvard effort is focused on the origin of life, not the evolutoin of existing life. This article blurred the two things in a way similar to the article that prompted me to start a Pit thread a few weeks ago. Evolution by natural selection says nothing, nada, zip, about the origin of life. Too bad the press doesn’t seem to understand this…
That’s the point of Harvard’s work. To connect the origin of life to evolution to show every step is possible without divine intervention.
Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory.
Leave it to The Onion to put the debate into it’s relevant light.
Suppose that God is what exists, nothing can exist outside of existence, that evolution is existence( or what exists) moving, and growing inside of itself.
‘A’ God would need a place to be, but existence would not, as it would be all that is. No conflict that way as i see it.
Monavis
I feel as if I’ve just been handed a cloud sandwich.
I am hppy that you see some substance in my supposition, A cloud can bee seen, touched, photographed, and analyzed, so when put between ID and a creator it is the only thing of substance. It may not be very filling, but a cloud could provide you with something to quench your thirst. And everyone can see the cloud,no matter what one believes about the outer part of the sandwich.
Monavis