Oops, I am happy not hppy,of course if one put in their own letter it would sure make a difference in my feelings, wouldn’t it? :smack:
Monavis
It’s a shame the debate seems to be petering out a bit…
I’ve commented before (post #28) on my thoughts on ID Theory, but there is one aspect of it, which edwino mentioned, that intrigues me.
That is the dependence of considerable evolutionary thought on the concept of randomness. Unfortunately, in evolutionary theory a lot of things are assumed to be random, which can’t easily be tested for randomness (e.g. lateral transfer of genes between lineages, accidental base pair substitutions). If I believed in a divine entity, that’s where I’d try to insert the possibility of a Creator into the mix. It’s a good sign of how compelling evolutionary theory is that it must be co-opted by ID proponents, but I think the real weakness of evolutionary theory is the assumption of randomness in many portions. What if some of those processes aren’t random?
Would it be possible to falsify the proposition that accidental base pair substitutions aren’t random?
I would guess yes, but I’m not sure I’m well-versed enough in statistics to be confident of my answer.
Like any philosophical argument (and that is what ID is - a philosophical argument called teleology), any argument can trigger a counter-argument. My argument against ID is: If were were “designed” why were we designed so imperfectly? Look at the shark. The shark is almost perfectly designed for its environment while we have the coccyx (vestigital tail), a useless appendix, and our knees are backwards.
Specific proof of evolution. Try and explain penicillin resistant bacteria other than by evolution?
You may want to read “On Nature” by Parmenides of Elea
It doesn’t seem to me that ID has any merit so I would expect a statement that it has merit to be opposed.
Intelligent design strongly suggests, probably even requires, that there be some purpose behind design choices and that the overall system have some logical connection between its parts. That doesn’t seem to be the case in the human anatomy.
For example, ID proponents make a big fuss over the eye claiming that the whole eye had to develop at once or it would have been of no use. This claim assumes that there is an entity, ‘the eye,’ that is unique. However there are lots of different eyes. I believe the number is now put at something like seventeen. It is merely contingent that our eye is like it is. There is no logical reason why our eye isn’t like one of the others or some other eye that doesn’t exist here on earth.
Another example. We take in liquid, food, and air through the same opening so we can choke to death. There is no logical reason why air has to be taken in in such a way. The current method is again a contingent method. An intelligent designer would have assured a continuous supply of such a vital fuel as air. The designer must have valued dogs and even snakes more than humans because snakes can’t choke and dogs have great difficulty in doing so. And since ID’s source states that the animals were designed first, the designer had already developed the superior method but didn’t use it on humans apparently preferring to develop another and inferior design for us.
And for that matter our getting air only from external gas is also a contingent trait because it could have been otherwise. We could have been designed so that we could get air from both the atmospheric gas and from water making drowning no problem. Since the earth’s surface is 70% water covered that would seem to me to be a prudent design feature of a creature having a strong survival desire designed into it.
Such things as these demonstrate to my satisfaction and that of many others, that ID is a faulty idea well worth of stiff opposition whenever and wherever it shows up.
Another such example is the Cambrian explosion, the subject of a recently article currently being discussed in another thread about ID in this forum. The author contends that only intelligent design could explain the origin of the large number of novel body plans seen in the Cambrian. Of course, it doesn’t explain why the majority of those novel body plans were discarded after only a few tens of millions of years without leaving any descendents. The intelligent designer seems to be a tinkerer who produces an awful lot of short-lived jerry-built products rather than an engineer that plans anything out beforehand. The entire pattern of evolution of life on Earth provides no support for ID, and in fact strongly contradicts it, unless the designer is intelligent but psychotic.
Let’s not be shy about making some assumptions about such a designer. It must have God-like powers to effect evolution. Such a being, able to manipulate genetic selection throughout the world, ought to be advanced to a degree whereby it should be a far superior designer than your average software engineer. Such a designer, able to set the laws of physics just so at the time of a big bang would need to be a true perfectionist. A designer that knows how to set just the right amount of gravity at at just the right nanosecond, and do the same with dozens of other quantum processes in the correct sequences should find evolutionary genetic selections to be a walk in the park.
Also, having billions of years to perfect the process of evolution should help eliminate errors as well. Some design errors left by lesser beings are often the result of deadlines, market forces, and so on.
In critiquing the natural theology of Archdeacan Paley, the guy who originated the ‘if your found a watch on the beach’ idea, David Hume pointed out that the idea of design in nature based on the watch analogy is faulty. We have a lot of experience with things that are designed and manufactured. By merely examining something in a cursory fashion it is simple to tell whether it belongs to that large class of manufactured objects. If it has gears, springs, levers, woven fabrics, etc. is clearly manufactured. We can even tell whether or not is it well made upon a little closer examination.
However, to our knowledge the universe is unique and is not a member of a large class of objects. We have no idea whether or not is is well designed and manufactured as compared with other universes. As Hume pointed out, for all we know, if we assume our universe was made by a designer, it might very well be the first try of an apprentice designer who abandoned it as a bad try without even finishing it.
That would be a great hypothesis to propose, write a book about, and demand be taught in the schools…The Theory of Psychotic Design. It would have more evidential backing than the theory of intelligent design and yet I somehow suspect that the suspects pushing ID and creationism would not be so excited to get behind it! 
Just to address to point of ID papers not getting published,there was an interesting article in last Friday’s (8/19/05) Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/18/AR2005081801680.html
(I dont know how long the link will be active, but the title is “Editor Explains Reasons for ‘Intelligent Design’ Article” for those with Lexis-Nexis).
It appears an ID article was published a while ago in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington by Steven Meyer:The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 117(2):213-239.
It seems to have caused quite an uproar. A rebuttal of the article is on the Panda’s Thumb website:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000430.html
I think the rebuttal is a good read.
I didn’t read everything in depth, but it reminded me that publication in even “peer-reviewed” journals is political (maybe more so in an obscure journal like this one).
In a nutshell, the article is pro-ID, and critics are accusing the editor of the journal, Richard Sternberg, of being a closet creationist who abused his editiorial position to by-pass peer review and publish the article.
Now, the critics claim, ID proponents can claim that ID has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but nobody will be aware of the behind the scenes machinations that led to this publication. ID proponents can now trumpet a “legitimacy”, which the, say, school boards in Kansas can jump on. (I doubt a Kansas school board member appreciates the difference in impact fator between *Nature, Cell * or Science, and the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
This is probably a topic for a new thread, but I thought it relevant to some of the posts about published articles giving legitmacy to validity of a “theory”.
I realize the score in peer-reviewed journals is like 1 ID to 10,000s of evolution, but all IDers need is one to trumpet in the media and be heard.
Ah, the politics of science.
GW Bush and Frist disgree on stem cells, but not ID. GWB’s a lame duck, but Frist is reading the tea leaves. But I digress.
I just saw this same article was in the OP of this thread:
On further consideration, I would propose that the Great Omnipotent Designer must be an Autistic Savant, rather than psychotic. 
The main problem with the published article is that it makes no case whatsoever for ID. So claiming that ID theories have been published in a respected journal is itself bunk. All the article does is repeat some common ID cannards about the Cambrian period, and suggest that scientists don’t have good answers to these questions (though, being woefully incomplete in its discussion of the subject, even this claim is a mess). Even if the article wasn’t goofily inappropriate for the journal it was published, it still wouldn’t be any sort of positive ID argument. In general, that’s no surprise, because there pretty much aren’t any.
This isn’t a disproof of ID per se, but the upshot might speak to ID theorists’ integrity, or lack thereof.
Michael Behe, of Darwin’s Black Box fame once claimed that if scientists could use forced evolution to reproduce the bacterial flagellum in a previously non-motile species, he’d come around and accept Darwinian Evolution as a sufficient explanation for the development of flagella and other complex molecular machines. He considered such a finding a sufficient disproof of his assertion that only intelligent design could explain the existence of such “irreducible complexity”.
If you check out the end of this article (though I recommend reading the whole thing), you’ll find that Dr. Richard E. Lenski has observed something purportedly on the order of Behe’s demand. As of the writing of the NYT piece, Behe says “I’ll wait and see.”
Any bets on what the verdict will be?
…from the Onion link posted above:
All I have to say is–and I suppose this point has been made–that I just love how right-wingers invent new terms for old issues in order to revitalize them and make them applicable to The Common Man. Inheritance tax becomes Death tax (because Republicans inherit, but everybody dies); late-term abortion becomes partial-birth; Creationism becomes Intelligent Design. It just sounds cool, doesn’t it? I mean, it doesn’t sound like something you’d want to be on the other side of.
“Do you believe in Intelligent Design?”
“No, I believe in Stupid Mistakes!” :rolleyes:
I have to admit, I haven’t followed this thread very closely. From the bits I’ve read, some of you may find this story from *The Seattle Times, *( Evolving opinion of one man) interesting.
Nope, and it’s got nothing to do with statistics. Any apparently random series of events could have been deliberately crafted to look random, assuming a method existed by which they could manipulate the results.
For example, take a coin and flip it 100 times, writing down the results. Then, place the coin down 100 times, with heads or tails facing up as indicated by your list. The series of heads and tails is the same in either case, but the first time through the series was a result of randomity (presumably), and the second time through it was decidedly the result of intelligent design.
Similarly, the dinosaur bones could have been created in God’s Dino Bone shop and placed in precise positions among the carefully planned sediment and mineral layers (the fine work of Godly Landscaping Incorporated) just before God created billions of people (Mattel) with artificial memories and falsified artifacts --and he could put all of this into place and set it into motion literally ten minutes ago. If everything was crafted carefully enough to look like the result of natural causes, we could never tell the difference.
Basically, when you toss an all-powerful God into the mix, nothing is (entirely) falsifiable.
Ach, scratch the ‘(entirely)’ out of the last line. Things are falsifiable or they’re not.
after reading this entire thread, my answer to the OP question is:
“no, ID cannot be falsified”
then again neither can the question “can the 'there is a god” theory be falsified"…
to me they are the same question with the same inherent motivation…