# Intelligent Design-Whodunnit? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [August 29, 2012, 11:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024 "2012-08-29T11:40:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![THEMAYAN](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/779978/32.png) [@THEMAYAN](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THEMAYAN)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2012, 10:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/121 "2012-09-07T10:43:14Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > I don’t know if there’s a name for the type of logical fallacy THEMAYAN is falling pray to, but it’s an important yet fine difference that basically amounts to the opposite of the Anthropic Principle. > > It’s like looking at [this chart,](http://visual.ly/what-are-odds) the Odds of of You Being Born, in the way presented. That the chances of you existing, when you start from the bottom up are so close to zero, that it must be some sort of divine result that you do. > > But in reality, it’s the opposite angle; the top down. You’re the end result of a zillion random occurrences, plain and simple. Your argument is a non sequitur. If your parents go to the same school, work together or even if they just happen to meet in a park etc. and fall in love an marry, the odds of them having a child is not that low whether it be you or anyone else who is conceived, but the real truth is they don’t have to fall in love and the odds of people in general hooking up and having children is very high and needs none of the caveats that this example requires in order to be true. In fact not only do they not have to fall (in that trick love mentioned before), but they don’t even have to marry. Furthermore you cannot factor in all sperm cells, since only a handful of the strongest will have a chance, and this can and has been quantified in real time. It also presumes that we are descendant of prokaryote organisms which has never been proved empirically. This example doesn’t even show how it reached these mathematic statistics concerning prokaryote to man. However lets just use you example for argument sake. You left out one important thing. It took at least two intelligent agents to produce you. Before space matter and time there was nothing. However I do agree that your example does demonstrate just how unique and special you really are, and how grateful you should be to be alive, and by the way, according to this logic, all science that uses statistical probabilities have to be thrown out the window because by this standard, statistics are irrelevant and can potentially be used to counter any argument concerning probability factors. Again this would destroy a whole segment of science. Try using this argument with the odds keeper in Vegas and tell us how you do buddy. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2012, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/122 "2012-09-07T14:39:37Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > Before space matter and time there was nothing. You know this, how, exactly? True, absolute nothingness doesn’t add anything to your argument. As long as there’s something, nothingness is meaningless. Since there is no time between states of nothingness and somethingness, and knowing somethingness is true, since we can all agree we’re _here_, then nothingness isn’t possible; as soon as you give it some property, it becomes _something._ ---
**Author:** ![getitrite](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47774/32.png) [@getitrite](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/getitrite)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2012, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/123 "2012-09-07T16:22:30Z")
Saw a beautiful double rainbow in the sky yesterday. By science explanations that did not exist, just an illusion. The light striking a moist atmosphere, and then being defracted to produce the light. Can’t touch it. I can see it, but it does not exist. The energy of sunlight and the atmospheric conditions only. So its all energys fault, ok with that ? The question is more to the point are we also an illusion produced by the energy of the universe. A how did it manage to be displayed so that we can touch each other, the illusion that we are real. The fact that the science is ordered and not choatic in its choice. Sorry for the derail. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2012, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/124 "2012-09-07T17:18:44Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > What is intelligent design? > Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. You’ll have to be more specific about what you mean by “informational properties.” Of course something similar to what we know has been intelligently designed doesn’t have to be intelligently designed. We breed dogs and horses for speed, but that doesn’t mean that a cheetah was deliberately bred for speed. You accurately describe the ID community as looking for examples, being pre-convinced. They might do better collecting data and seeing if ID is necessary given the state of our knowledge. A few hundred years ago ID was a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, given the state of our knowledge. It is no longer necessary. > [@](#): > > Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago. We have no examples of irreducibly complex structures. How information gets stored in DNA is well understood, and needs no intelligence. The nature of physical constants has nothing to do with ID as biology. Geologically rapid means biologically slow. It was certainly a lot slower than changes due to the Ice Ages. In any case, that record would seem to reflect non-intelligent development. > [@](#): > > Is intelligent design the same as creationism? > No. The theory of intelligent design is simply an effort to empirically detect whether the “apparent design” in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations. Creationism typically starts with a religious text and tries to see how the findings of science can be reconciled to it. Intelligent design starts with the empirical evidence of nature and seeks to ascertain what inferences can be drawn from that evidence. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design does not claim that modern biology can identify whether the intelligent cause detected through science is supernatural. > Honest critics of intelligent design acknowledge the difference between intelligent design and creationism. University of Wisconsin historian of science Ronald Numbers is critical of intelligent design, yet according to the Associated Press, he “agrees the creationist label is inaccurate when it comes to the ID [intelligent design] movement.” Why, then, do some Darwinists keep trying to conflate intelligent design with creationism? According to Dr. Numbers, it is because they think such claims are “the easiest way to discredit intelligent design.” In other words, the charge that intelligent design is “creationism” is a rhetorical strategy on the part of Darwinists who wish to delegitimize design theory without actually addressing the merits of its case. The answer to this question is “it depends.” Behe accepts evolution, in the New York Times, at least. If ID was a purely scientific endeavor (and things can be wrong and still scientific) it would have nothing to do with creationism. But, as the Dover trial demonstrated, the term ID has been used by creationists to give them cover. The trial mentioned a creationist textbook which was modified by substituting ID for creationism. So, ID as used by the fundamentalists definitely is equivalent to creationism. As science, ID has definitely been addressed, for instance when evolutionary mechanisms have been offered to explain supposedly irreducibly complex structures. > [@](#): > > Is intelligent design a scientific theory? Yes. The scientific method is commonly described as a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion. Intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed. ID is a hypothesis, it certainly does not have enough support to make it to the level of a theory. It is quite easy to measure the amount of information in a gene. While designed object have high levels of information (sometimes) so do undesigned objects if you can show a mechanism that explains the information content. Evolution and natural selection does this quite nicely. If the evolution of one out of millions of structures is not yet understood, that would seem to indicate that we don’t know everything far more than that the structure is the result of design. One would think we would be overwhelmed with examples of design, and examples of jumps in the fossil record not explained through evolution. We don’t see any of these. ID in the scientific sense is also incoherent. We know that life evolved over a billion years or so. When was the design done? Did the designer do it all at once, tweaks every few million years, or continuously? Why did he also use evolution, and not just design more or less from scratch? Did he design all species or just a few? The Biblical creation story, while wrong, at least makes sense. Not so ID, which is desperately trying to find a place where God is required in what is clearly a purely secular process. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2012, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/125 "2012-09-07T17:36:30Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > I still disagree that cooking the books in peer review would be easy. As for your occupation, If you are telling me the truth, and I have no reason to accuse you of lying, then you would have to appreciate the amount, and not just of ultra skepticism, but visceral hatred that many in Academia have for ID. Your not going to find a lot of yes men. Lets be real man. I’m a computer scientist/electrical engineer, and I’ve worked in industry my entire career, so I have no personal stake. My wife is a biologist, but she studied reproductive physiology, not evolution, and is a writer now, not an academic. I am a skeptic, and I dislike stupid religious based attempts to downgrade science. [/quote] These reviewers understood the subject extremely well and where the most qualified and they had PHD’s in the field, so this point of yours is moot. [/quote] Not at all. I’ve got a PhD, and the reviewers I would use would have PhDs also, but PhDs are very specialized and biology is far broader and more diverse than my field. I’m pretty good at digital circuit design, but I’m totally unqualified to do a good job reviewing a paper on analog circuit design. The reviewer pool for that journal would be unlikely to have experts on evolution - which is totally appropriate. > [@](#): > > I also have to refute your assessment of Sternberg. There are blogs out there, and not just by lay people, but by other scientist including members the NSCE who have written or said things about him publicly that are akin to a hit piece. They tried to destroy this guys career and portray him as a quack, and to set an example to anyone else who dare OK a paper like this for publishing in the future. This I don’t dispute. I don’t know if it is correct, but it could be. Scientists are people too. Remember Dawkins wrote his books as a result of getting too much hate mail from creationist yahoos. If you are an evolutionary biologist, and have seen morons try to teach their false beliefs in school as science in order to be fair, and this clown pushes the limits on editorial ethics to get a rare peer-reviewed reference for ID, you might lose your temper also. There are few things as intense as academic arguments. > [@](#): > > As for Behe, again even the most critical of ID theory such as people like Eugenie Scott director of the NCSE has gone on to admit that IC/irreducible complexity is a valid construct, however she believes that neo Darwinian process are capable of producing an IC system. Unfortunately she nor anyone else can offer any empirical evidence to support this claim, although Nick Matzke’s and Ken Miller have tried. I especially love Millers tie clip analogy. Thats right, he even had a tie clip modeled after a mouse trap out of which he tries to use to refute Behe’s argument with. It is very silly and filled with holes but that never stopped Miller before. Like I said before the subject was one of getting published in peer review, and now that they are, the goal post will narrow and only some journals will count, and then the critic will find another goal post. etc etc etc. All we can do is to describe a mechanism for which supposedly IR structures evolve. We clearly can’t go back and look. Introducing a designer really needs some extraordinary evidence, none of which is forthcoming. As I said above, if we have clear mechanisms for the evolution of 99.9% of structures, it is far more likely that we don’t know the mechanisms for the remaining 0.1% rather than that we need a designer. As I said, the level of journal quality is factor in all fields. My daughter is finishing a PhD in psychology and business, and she is very sensitive to the fact that publishing in some journals will get you a good post Doc and publishing in others won’t help much at all. Same goes for tenure decisions. That you are not aware of this makes your opinions on peer review not very valid. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2012, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/126 "2012-09-07T17:44:55Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > You’re asking the wrong question. You cant falsify a negative or an unobservable hypothetical. The real question you should be asking yourself is what evidence is there to support it? > > The word “possibility” can itself be used as a non falsifiable wild card. Fine then, I’d argue that the evidence is akin to the Anthropic Principle. It’s far more convincing that an infinitude of universes, spawning permutations of the laws of physics, eventually led to just the right mix for life, intelligent or otherwise, to evolve from ordinary matter, and bringing forth holistic, intelligent minds to even question our origins. Rather than going a step further, begging the question of, “God Diddit,”\* because I reject the idea of an infinitely recursive universe(s). You’re still stuck with the same quandary, but unlike you, I’m not sticking my fingers in my ears, or covering my eyes from a place of conviction, but rather logical deduction. Shit, I’ll even grant you the _possibility_ of an ID. But my thinking on those grounds comes up with the opposite position of yours. \*substitute your deity or your favorite intelligent designer of choice here. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2012, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/127 "2012-09-07T17:48:32Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > Your argument is a non sequitur. If your parents go to the same school, work together or even if they just happen to meet in a park etc. and fall in love an marry, the odds of them having a child is not that low whether it be you or anyone else who is conceived, but the real truth is they don’t have to fall in love and the odds of people in general hooking up and having children is very high and needs none of the caveats that this example requires in order to be true. In fact not only do they not have to fall (in that trick love mentioned before), but they don’t even have to marry. > > Furthermore you cannot factor in all sperm cells, since only a handful of the strongest will have a chance, and this can and has been quantified in real time. It also presumes that we are descendant of prokaryote organisms which has never been proved empirically. This example doesn’t even show how it reached these mathematic statistics concerning prokaryote to man. The probability that some baby will be born to a couple can be easily calculated, and is reasonably high. The probability that **you** will be born is very low. Besides the number of sperm, position and timing matters also. If the phone had rung before your conception you would not be here. Speaking for personal experience, it is a wonder that there are second children at all. Your use of the word “proven” is telling. Without a really, really good time machine we will never prove or even know every step in our evolution. But the genetic record is plenty good enough, and it is what is expected given evolution. It is a lot better than any other hypothesis. ---
**Author:** ![THEMAYAN](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/779978/32.png) [@THEMAYAN](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THEMAYAN)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2012, 11:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/128 "2012-09-08T11:15:05Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > You’ll have to be more specific about what you mean by “informational properties.” Of course something similar to what we know has been intelligently designed doesn’t have to be intelligently designed. We breed dogs and horses for speed, but that doesn’t mean that a cheetah was deliberately bred for speed. > You accurately describe the ID community as looking for examples, being pre-convinced. They might do better collecting data and seeing if ID is necessary given the state of our knowledge. A few hundred years ago ID was a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, given the state of our knowledge. It is no longer necessary. > We have no examples of irreducibly complex structures. How information gets stored in DNA is well understood, and needs no intelligence. The nature of physical constants has nothing to do with ID as biology. Geologically rapid means biologically slow. It was certainly a lot slower than changes due to the Ice Ages. In any case, that record would seem to reflect non-intelligent development. > > The answer to this question is “it depends.” Behe accepts evolution, in the New York Times, at least. If ID was a purely scientific endeavor (and things can be wrong and still scientific) it would have nothing to do with creationism. But, as the Dover trial demonstrated, the term ID has been used by creationists to give them cover. The trial mentioned a creationist textbook which was modified by substituting ID for creationism. So, ID as used by the fundamentalists definitely is equivalent to creationism. > As science, ID has definitely been addressed, for instance when evolutionary mechanisms have been offered to explain supposedly irreducibly complex structures. > ID is a hypothesis, it certainly does not have enough support to make it to the level of a theory. It is quite easy to measure the amount of information in a gene. While designed object have high levels of information (sometimes) so do undesigned objects if you can show a mechanism that explains the information content. Evolution and natural selection does this quite nicely. > If the evolution of one out of millions of structures is not yet understood, that would seem to indicate that we don’t know everything far more than that the structure is the result of design. One would think we would be overwhelmed with examples of design, and examples of jumps in the fossil record not explained through evolution. We don’t see any of these. > > ID in the scientific sense is also incoherent. We know that life evolved over a billion years or so. When was the design done? Did the designer do it all at once, tweaks every few million years, or continuously? Why did he also use evolution, and not just design more or less from scratch? Did he design all species or just a few? The Biblical creation story, while wrong, at least makes sense. Not so ID, which is desperately trying to find a place where God is required in what is clearly a purely secular process. Not only do irreducible complex systems exist in biology, but even ID’s greatest critic Eugenie Scott Director of the NCSE admits that it is a valid scientific construct. Of couse she believes that a neo Darwinian process can explain these systems, but unfortunately no one has been able to demonstrate this in any great detail. Many have tried, but when looking at their work, they rely on imaginary leaps and bounds in logic and in logistics. As for DNA, the question is not on how information gets stored in DNA. The question is what is the origin of genetic information. This has never been resolved. There are many hypothesis but no detailed plausible explanation. ID is not restricted to biology but includes cosmology so your point on physical constants is moot. Theories have nothing to do with a consensus. If they did, we wouldn’t have half the theories we do now. The strength of a theory is based on its ability to make predictions that turn out to be correct. The Cambrian phyla fits more with a design model than of this notion of gradual descent with modification. These phyla appear within a geological blink of an eye. Some say the initial radiation event occurred within 10,5,3 million years depending on who you ask. Some of the experts in China believe it was instantaneous, and not because they are Christian, (because their not) but because they appear to come out of nowhere and with no known ancestry all ready highly specialized and within their own categories and classification. This sudden appearance occurs in several orders of magnitude and globally. We have a 60-80 million year record of this Cambrian era. Junk DNA turning out to have function was predicted by ID theorist for decades. Again the fine tuning of the universe is another example of what you would expect to see, and not so if things were just a result of a chaotic unguided event. The Goldilocks planet is another example. The digital encoded information in the genome and nano technical machinery within our cells etc. The fact that institutions like Park Center at MIT are now using top down axiomatic design theory structured specifically for intelligently designed complex and engineered systems in the field of Systems biology to help us better understand the cell, and are doing so with great success. I.e. approaching the cell as an intelligently designed and engineered system is shedding a whole new light on the cell and how we view the cell. ID is an alternative theory that I believe makes the most sense, especially when one is willing to drop all preconceived ideas and dogmas (which is exactly what MIT says in its brochures for student who are considering getting into this emerging field) ---
**Author:** ![THEMAYAN](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/779978/32.png) [@THEMAYAN](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THEMAYAN)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2012, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/129 "2012-09-09T04:34:56Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I’m a computer scientist/electrical engineer, and I’ve worked in industry my entire career, so I have no personal stake. My wife is a biologist, but she studied reproductive physiology, not evolution, and is a writer now, not an academic. I am a skeptic, and I dislike stupid religious based attempts to downgrade science. These reviewers understood the subject extremely well and where the most qualified and they had PHD’s in the field, so this point of yours is moot. [/quote] Not at all. I’ve got a PhD, and the reviewers I would use would have PhDs also, but PhDs are very specialized and biology is far broader and more diverse than my field. I’m pretty good at digital circuit design, but I’m totally unqualified to do a good job reviewing a paper on analog circuit design. The reviewer pool for that journal would be unlikely to have experts on evolution - which is totally appropriate. This I don’t dispute. I don’t know if it is correct, but it could be. Scientists are people too. Remember Dawkins wrote his books as a result of getting too much hate mail from creationist yahoos. If you are an evolutionary biologist, and have seen morons try to teach their false beliefs in school as science in order to be fair, and this clown pushes the limits on editorial ethics to get a rare peer-reviewed reference for ID, you might lose your temper also. There are few things as intense as academic arguments. All we can do is to describe a mechanism for which supposedly IR structures evolve. We clearly can’t go back and look. Introducing a designer really needs some extraordinary evidence, none of which is forthcoming. As I said above, if we have clear mechanisms for the evolution of 99.9% of structures, it is far more likely that we don’t know the mechanisms for the remaining 0.1% rather than that we need a designer. As I said, the level of journal quality is factor in all fields. My daughter is finishing a PhD in psychology and business, and she is very sensitive to the fact that publishing in some journals will get you a good post Doc and publishing in others won’t help much at all. Same goes for tenure decisions. That you are not aware of this makes your opinions on peer review not very valid. [/QUOTE] Poor Dawkins. Listen, when you call people delusional and evil because they dont believe as you do, or because they interpret the science differently then you. Then should be able to take your own medicine. You should see the hate mail the DI gets. As for your stament that … “As I said above, if we have clear mechanisms for the evolution of 99.9% of structures” this is a myth and this is one of the reasons for the Altenberg 16 summit. These men who are evolutionist themselves understand that the modern synthesis is no longer a sufficient theoretic frame work in light of 21st century empirical data. Again even many of these evolutionary biologist are honest enough to admit the theory need to be reformulated, and Stuart Newman who is a major player is very critical of the neo Darwin tape worm industry. He blames a lot of mistrust by the general public, on his own colleagues and admits people have been lied too. He even criticizes the science advisories at the Dover trial for misleading people and he is speaking of the plaintiffs. (See “Will the Real Theory of Evolution Please Stand up” part 4 of 5 to be specific. Unfortunately for this group who are trying to extend the evolutionary synthesis and who represent thousands more, the neo Darwinist lobby do not support this effort in what one would think would be a step toward the advancement of science. It seems to many have a vested interest in the same outdated neo Darwinian paradigme that we still teach and preach today. Needless to say, the NCSE and NAS do not support this proposed extended synthesis, and again for reasons already mentioned. It seems more are worried about giving talking points to the enemy, than to advance science, and are more than willing to allow the education of of our children to become sacrificial lambs in an ongoing culture war. Today everything from the paradigme of Junk DNA, to the biologies central dogma, to gene centrism, gradualism, and even the limitations of natural selections and random mutations are now being challenged, and not just by creationist and ID’ers, but by biologist who specialize in evolutionary theory/evo devo. Let me give a couple of examples of recent peer review, and I’m not even including the (dissent from Darwin) list who’s cosigners number over a thousand from National Academy’s all over the world, including the US National Academy of Science as well as from major universities throughout the world, not to mention the fact that many of these signers are atheist and agnostic with no religious bone to pick. The new biology: beyond the Modern Synthesis Michael R Rose1\* and Todd H Oakley2 The last third of the 20th Century featured an accumulation of research findings that severely challenged the assumptions of the “Modern Synthesis” which provided the foundations for most biological research during that century. The foundations of that “Modernist” biology had thus largely crumbled by the start of the 21st Century. This in turn raises the question of foundations for biology in the 21st Century. Soft inheritance: challenging the modern synthesis Eva JablonkaI; Marion J. LambII This paper concludes…“In view of the data that support soft inheritance, as well as other challenges to the Modern Synthesis, it is concluded that that synthesis no longer offers a satisfactory theoretical framework for evolutionary biology” Epigenetics: a challenge for genetics, evolution, and development? Van de Vijver G, Van Speybroeck L, De Waele D. Abstract In this paper, it is argued that differences in how one relates the genome to its surrounding contexts leads to diverse interpretations of the term epigenetics. Three different approaches are considered, ranging from gene-centrism, over gene-regulation, to dynamic systems approaches. Although epigenetics receives its widest interpretation in a systems approach, a paradigmatic shift has taken place in biology from the abandonment of a gene-centric position on to the present. The epistemological and ontological consequences of this shift are made explicit" Indeed, researchers like John Mattick of Queensland University, Australia think that the idea of junk DNA is junk science: Researchers the world over are confirming that non-coding DNA holds critical clues to a vast range of diseases; breast cancer, HIV, Crohn’s disease, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, ovarian and skin cancer … the list is growing daily. A leading figure in world genetics, Prof. John Mattick, recently claimed that, ‘the failure to recognise the implications of the non-coding DNA will go down as the biggest mistake in the history of molecular biology’ [Genius of Junk (DNA), Catalyst, Thursday, 10 July 2003]. Junk DNA’ Can Sense Viral Infection: Promising Tool in the Battle Between Pathogen and Host ScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2012) — Once considered unimportant “junk DNA,” scientists have learned that non-coding RNA (ncRNA) – RNA molecules that do not translate into proteins – play a crucial role in cellular function. Mutations in ncRNA Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees; Gene; Volume 346, 14 February 2005: The early genome comparison by DNA hybridization techniques suggested a nucleotide difference of 1-2%. Recently, direct nucleotide sequencing confirmed this estimate. These findings generated the common belief that the human is extremely close to the chimpanzee at the genetic level. However, if one looks at proteins, which are mainly responsible for phenotypic differences, the picture is quite different, and about 80% of proteins are different between the two species. [Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees - PubMed](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15716009) Although the paper above did says…“these findings generated the common belief that the human is extremely close to the chimpanzee at the genetic level” He only counted SNP’s, below is an estimate of the overal differential. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia may 2010 HUMAN CHIMP GENOME COMPARISON The draft sequence of the common chimpanzee genome published in the summer 2005 showed the regions that are similar enough to be aligned with one another account for 2400 million of the human genome’s 3164.7 million bases[19] – that is, 75.8% of the genome. This 75.8% of the human genome is 1.23% different from the chimpanzee genome in single nucleotide polymorphisms[19] (changes of single DNA “letters” in the genome). Another type of difference, called indels (insertions/deletions) account for another ~3% difference between the alignable sequences.[19] In addition, variation in copy number of large segments (\> 20 kb) of similar DNA sequence provides a further 2.7% difference between the two species.[20] Hence the total similarity of the genomes could be as low as about 70% National Human Genome Research Institute (Press Release), New Findings Challenge Established Views on Human Genome, June 13 2007. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/130 "2012-09-10T04:35:07Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > Not only do irreducible complex systems exist in biology, but even ID’s greatest critic Eugenie Scott Director of the NCSE admits that it is a valid scientific construct. Of couse she believes that a neo Darwinian process can explain these systems, but unfortunately no one has been able to demonstrate this in any great detail. Many have tried, but when looking at their work, they rely on imaginary leaps and bounds in logic and in logistics. Please give some examples. You mentioned cilia, but a pathway to that has already been found. And please give some cites supporting what you claim these people say, so I can see the context. Sure ID in the broad sense is not against any physical laws, since we intelligently design through breeding and through recombinant DNA all the time. That does not mean it ever happened. As I said above, one currently unexplained structure out of millions just means that we haven’t yet explained it. And nobody ever got a grant or tenure from finding an explanation for yet another supposedly IR structure. After a few, it is a waste of time to try to explain more. > [@](#): > > As for DNA, the question is not on how information gets stored in DNA. The question is what is the origin of genetic information. This has never been resolved. There are many hypothesis but no detailed plausible explanation. ID is not restricted to biology but includes cosmology so your point on physical constants is moot. Theories have nothing to do with a consensus. If they did, we wouldn’t have half the theories we do now. The strength of a theory is based on its ability to make predictions that turn out to be correct. What question is there again? Sure we don’t know the full details, since RNA does not leave good fossils, but once you have a self-replicating molecule you need little else. Everything else provides a reproductive advantage. Clearly you can get to all sorts of different DNA structures from simple ones without any miracles happening. I have seen people claiming some sort of conservation of information law, which is totally bogus, so I trust that isn’t your point. Since there is no godly authority telling when predictions are correct (and in real life things aren’t so simple) consensus tells us when most have accepted a theory. New evidence can change a consensus, and the consensus is conservative, as it should be. Some people challenging a consensus turn out to be right, but not many. > [@](#): > > The Cambrian phyla fits more with a design model than of this notion of gradual descent with modification. These phyla appear within a geological blink of an eye. Some say the initial radiation event occurred within 10,5,3 million years depending on who you ask. Some of the experts in China believe it was instantaneous, and not because they are Christian, (because their not) but because they appear to come out of nowhere and with no known ancestry all ready highly specialized and within their own categories and classification. This sudden appearance occurs in several orders of magnitude and globally. We have a 60-80 million year record of this Cambrian era. Even Dawkins has rejected pure Darwinian gradualism. I don’t know who would expect to find a complete record from that far back, so missing ancestors doesn’t mean a while lot. And even 3 million years is a lot of generations. But the big question is this: if there was a designer, why would he design so many animals that went extinct so quickly? A rather stupid designer, it seems to me. > [@](#): > > Junk DNA turning out to have function was predicted by ID theorist for decades. Again the fine tuning of the universe is another example of what you would expect to see, and not so if things were just a result of a chaotic unguided event. The Goldilocks planet is another example. The digital encoded information in the genome and nano technical machinery within our cells etc. Give a specific prediction, please. The discovery is of yet another kludge. I wouldn’t be surprised if ID theorists predicted that the junk dna had direct control, but I wonder if they predicted what the actual case is. Our DNA sequences (and their relationship to other species) is not at all an indicator of design. A designer could do a much better job. A designer would reuse sequences for similar functions across species, not what we see. > [@](#): > > The fact that institutions like Park Center at MIT are now using top down axiomatic design theory structured specifically for intelligently designed complex and engineered systems in the field of Systems biology to help us better understand the cell, and are doing so with great success. I.e. approaching the cell as an intelligently designed and engineered system is shedding a whole new light on the cell and how we view the cell. ID is an alternative theory that I believe makes the most sense, especially when one is willing to drop all preconceived ideas and dogmas (which is exactly what MIT says in its brochures for student who are considering getting into this emerging field) Do any of the people you quote as supporting ID in fact actually support ID? If not, why not? Creationists have a history of taking quotes out of context, they even did this to Gould. Again, I ask : who did the design? When did they do the design? How long did they design, with how many interactions? Did they design all species or just a few? Why did they design a system that looks like it evolved with no direction, when it could have been designed much more cleanly? Can anyone answer these questions? Behe, of course, accepts evolution. As a devout Catholic, he wanted to find the hand of God in our evolution, as predicted by theistic evolution. He failed. You don’t even have an argument. Making it look like a lot of evolutionary biologists are IDers in disguise isn’t one. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/131 "2012-09-10T04:50:14Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > Poor Dawkins. Listen, when you call people delusional and evil because they dont believe as you do, or because they interpret the science differently then you. Then should be able to take your own medicine. You should see the hate mail the DI gets. As for your stament that … “As I said above, if we have clear mechanisms for the evolution of 99.9% of structures” this is a myth and this is one of the reasons for the Altenberg 16 summit. These men who are evolutionist themselves understand that the modern synthesis is no longer a sufficient theoretic frame work in light of 21st century empirical data. Belief in an inerrant Bible and creationism, which I suspect is the case for the writers of the nasty letters he got, is delusional. If you want to defend god belief, start a GD thread. His evolution books are not “The God Delusion.” BTW you are echoing creationist arguments, which often go “evolutionists are changing their minds, so we must be right.” It is not at all surprising that many of our ideas on how evolution works are wrong and will be corrected as we get more information. That is **not** an argument for design. The evolution of the horse I learned as a kid was way too simplistic. That does not mean the horse was designed. > [@](#): > > Again even many of these evolutionary biologist are honest enough to admit the theory need to be reformulated, and Stuart Newman who is a major player is very critical of the neo Darwin tape worm industry. He blames a lot of mistrust by the general public, on his own colleagues and admits people have been lied too. He even criticizes the science advisories at the Dover trial for misleading people and he is speaking of the plaintiffs. (See “Will the Real Theory of Evolution Please Stand up” part 4 of 5 to be specific. If no theories ever needed to be changed science would be very boring. This is in no way an argument for design. > [@](#): > > Unfortunately for this group who are trying to extend the evolutionary synthesis and who represent thousands more, the neo Darwinist lobby do not support this effort in what one would think would be a step toward the advancement of science. You really don’t understand how science works, do you? This kind of battle is very common for anything important (and for many things unimportant.) Do any of these people wish to replace the old paradigm with ID? If not, all of this is totally irrelevant. It is as if you said Pluto being displaced as a planet implies that the stars are points of light suspended in a crystal sphere around the solar system. > [@](#): > > Today everything from the paradigme of Junk DNA, to the biologies central dogma, to gene centrism, gradualism, and even the limitations of natural selections and random mutations are now being challenged, and not just by creationist and ID’ers, but by biologist who specialize in evolutionary theory/evo devo. Let me give a couple of examples of recent peer review, and I’m not even including the (dissent from Darwin) list who’s cosigners number over a thousand from National Academy’s all over the world, including the US National Academy of Science as well as from major universities throughout the world, not to mention the fact that many of these signers are atheist and agnostic with no religious bone to pick. This demonstrates why religious people just don’t get it. Challenging the central dogmas of Christianity, say, used to get you burned and now gets you nasty messages from the Pope. Challenging the central dogmas of any scientific paradigm is what you are supposed to do. If you have no evidence, then you won’t get far. If you do, there will be pitched battles until one side wins. IDers have done nothing, since they claim they know the answers. Again, which of these challengers have considered ID as a reasonable hypothesis? But thanks for outing yourself as a creationist under ID colors. As I said, this is a very common strategy. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/132 "2012-09-10T05:16:21Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > . . . BTW you are echoing creationist arguments, which often go “evolutionists are changing their minds, so we must be right.” It is not at all surprising that many of our ideas on how evolution works are wrong and will be corrected as we get more information. That is **not** an argument for design. The evolution of the horse I learned as a kid was way too simplistic. That does not mean the horse was designed. . . . One of the creationists’ favorite stories is of the tooth that many paleontologists thought was evidence of early man in North America. It turned out to be a pig’s tooth. The creationists taunt with glee. Stupid evolutionists, can’t even tell a pig’s tooth from a man’s tooth. But what they never acknowledge is that it was paleontologists who figured it out. They were exuberant at first, but then started asking questions. Things didn’t add up. The tooth couldn’t be made to fit, in evolutionary terms. And when the facts were discovered – using the scientific method, and not the creationist method – paleontologists published the truth, widely, openly, and honestly. Compare this to… Well, fish in a barrel. ---
**Author:** ![THEMAYAN](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/779978/32.png) [@THEMAYAN](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THEMAYAN)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 9:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/133 "2012-09-10T09:19:58Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Please give some examples. You mentioned cilia, but a pathway to that has already been found. And please give some cites supporting what you claim these people say, so I can see the context. Sure ID in the broad sense is not against any physical laws, since we intelligently design through breeding and through recombinant DNA all the time. That does not mean it ever happened. As I said above, one currently unexplained structure out of millions just means that we haven’t yet explained it. And nobody ever got a grant or tenure from finding an explanation for yet another supposedly IR structure. After a few, it is a waste of time to try to explain more. > > What question is there again? Sure we don’t know the full details, since RNA does not leave good fossils, but once you have a self-replicating molecule you need little else. Everything else provides a reproductive advantage. Clearly you can get to all sorts of different DNA structures from simple ones without any miracles happening. I have seen people claiming some sort of conservation of information law, which is totally bogus, so I trust that isn’t your point. > > Since there is no godly authority telling when predictions are correct (and in real life things aren’t so simple) consensus tells us when most have accepted a theory. New evidence can change a consensus, and the consensus is conservative, as it should be. Some people challenging a consensus turn out to be right, but not many. > Even Dawkins has rejected pure Darwinian gradualism. I don’t know who would expect to find a complete record from that far back, so missing ancestors doesn’t mean a while lot. And even 3 million years is a lot of generations. > But the big question is this: if there was a designer, why would he design so many animals that went extinct so quickly? A rather stupid designer, it seems to me. > > Give a specific prediction, please. The discovery is of yet another kludge. I wouldn’t be surprised if ID theorists predicted that the junk dna had direct control, but I wonder if they predicted what the actual case is. Our DNA sequences (and their relationship to other species) is not at all an indicator of design. A designer could do a much better job. A designer would reuse sequences for similar functions across species, not what we see. > Do any of the people you quote as supporting ID in fact actually support ID? If not, why not? Creationists have a history of taking quotes out of context, they even did this to Gould. > > Again, I ask : who did the design? When did they do the design? How long did they design, with how many interactions? Did they design all species or just a few? Why did they design a system that looks like it evolved with no direction, when it could have been designed much more cleanly? > Can anyone answer these questions? > > Behe, of course, accepts evolution. As a devout Catholic, he wanted to find the hand of God in our evolution, as predicted by theistic evolution. He failed. > You don’t even have an argument. Making it look like a lot of evolutionary biologists are IDers in disguise isn’t one. Please read my post carefully. I never tried to be sly or deceptive. So please do not accuse me of that. People should be able to talk about these issue without making personel allegations. First off, for economy sake. I will only respond to a couple of statements. Starting with Junk DNA. I disagree. While it is true a very few in the the earlier days did find hints of potential function, their work was largely ignored by the status quo. For years we were told that only 2-5% (depending on who you asked) of the genome was functional, and the rest mindless scribble, (and again, in spite of those very few who questioned this paradigme. This useless vestigial junk DNA paradigm was used for years as the poster child for bad design. Hence the term “Junk” In the words of Kenneth Miller just a few short years ago,… “Intelligent design cannot explain the presence of a nonfunctional pseudogene, unless it is willing to allow that the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles. Evolution, however, can explain them easily… Richard Dawkins…“is more than is strictly necessary for building them: A large fraction of the DNA is never translated into protein. From the point of view of the individual organism this seems paradoxical. If the ‘purpose’ of DNA is to supervise the building of bodies, it is surprising to find a large quantity of DNA which does no such thing. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing. But from the point of view of the selfish genes themselves, there is no paradox. The true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA.“ (And let me add, gene centrism is another casualty of modern science) Although I will agree with Dawkins on one thing. “Some” were racking their brains, but I digress. We were told for years that this so called useless junk was just what the theory predicted, and we were told this even though back then, that wasn’t really the case, since these same ncDNA elements were highly conserved. This made no sense from an evolutionary perspective, however again, it was just written of as anomaly by the status quo since the more important message was one of demonstrating that all this useless junk could not have been a product of intelligent design, and they road that train until the wheels fell off. Even today people like Larry Moran and PZ Myers are still riding that train. Just recently Myers told a group of biology majors who idolize him, that in spite of the hype, its still mostly junk, and said, (and to paraphrase him) that those who questioned this paradigm were just biologist looking for job security. What kind of message is that to give to our future scientist? In my opinion its a science stopper because instead of stirring interest, he is stifling it. See ‘Rummaging About in the Genetic Junkyard Skepticon 4 PZ Myers’ for proper context. I’m citing from memory. This is exactly the attitude that the vast majority of neo Darwinian apologist in the scientific community had in the past, and again up until now. Even the citations that I cited in peer review earlier all say the same things under the title, or in the abstract. E.g…“One of the most unforeseen and potentially revolutionary findings since the complete annotation of the human genome is the complexity of noncoding DNA. What was once considered “junk DNA” now holds the keys to many novel gene regulatory mechanisms” “we also uncovered some surprises that challenge the current dogma on biological mechanisms.” The surprises all involve unexpected complexity in the genome; complexity that necessitates a revision of the way we think about transcription and genes.
Furthermore, the ENCODE findings should lead to the final demise of the term “Junk DNA” “Once considered unimportant “junk DNA,” scientists have learned that non-coding RNA (ncRNA) – RNA molecules that do not translate into proteins – play a crucial role in cellular function. Mutations in ncRNA” “For decades, scientists dismissed transposable elements, also known as transposons or “jumping genes”, as useless “junk DNA”. But are they really?” Wikipedia… “The term is used mainly in popular science and in a colloquial way in scientific publications, and its connotations may have slowed research into the biological functions of noncoding DNA” An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome The ENCODE Project Consortium\* The human genome encodes the blueprint of life, but the function of the vast majority of its nearly three billion bases is unknown. The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project has systematically mapped regions of transcription, transcription factor association, chromatin structure and histone modification. These data enabled us to assign biochemical functions for 80% of the genome, in particular outside of the well-studied protein-coding regions… If you think that people who challenge the status quo in evolutionary biology are not ignored or even sometimes ridiculed, even if they’re otherwise respected and high level scientist including members of NAS then see the story of… “Barbera Mcclintock Cold Spring Harbor digital archives” google it. I dont want to bombard you, but when I get a chance, I will next speak on the issue of the bacterial flagellum and IC/irreducible complexity. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 11:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/134 "2012-09-10T11:46:52Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > I dont want to bombard you, but when I get a chance, I will next speak on the issue of the bacterial flagellum and IC/irreducible complexity. Rather than bombarding us with all the things you think are evidence against evolution, would you mind just skipping your planned lecture series and give us any evidence you have_for_ Intelligent Design? Proving that 2+3 does not = 4 is not the same thing as proving that 1 +1 = 4, as my science and math teacher told us back in 6th grade, so where is the arduous scientific evidence for what you believe to be the truth? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/135 "2012-09-10T11:56:40Z")
Ghod, this thread a left turn. Folks, could you please re-read the the first post and stick to the possibilities and evidence for I.D., and leaving any discussion about evolution(both pro and anti) for another thread? Thank you. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/136 "2012-09-10T18:27:21Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > If you think that people who challenge the status quo in evolutionary biology are not ignored or even sometimes ridiculed, even if they’re otherwise respected and high level scientist including members of NAS then see the story of… “Barbera Mcclintock Cold Spring Harbor digital archives” google it. > > I dont want to bombard you, but when I get a chance, I will next speak on the issue of the bacterial flagellum and IC/irreducible complexity. None of what you posted has the slightest relevance to ID. We are discovering that things are more complicated than originally thought. That is not an argument for ID. The topic under discussion is not how polite scientists are. Anyone who has ever gone to a university seminar knows better than that. At high levels of technical expertise there are lots of big egos and frayed tempers. I was on a panel once where I said stuff that made a famous professor of computer architecture want to strangle me. Luckily, he was in the back of the room. So, big deal. Try again when any of these people are rejecting any current paradigm in favor of ID. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/137 "2012-09-10T18:29:20Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Ghod, this thread a left turn. Folks, could you please re-read the the first post and stick to the possibilities and evidence for I.D., and leaving any discussion about evolution(both pro and anti) for another thread? Thank you. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this creationist trick being used. I should have caught on faster. But at least now I get to delete huge irrelevant chunks of his posts. ---
**Author:** ![THEMAYAN](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/779978/32.png) [@THEMAYAN](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THEMAYAN)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/138 "2012-09-10T20:29:03Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Rather than bombarding us with all the things you think are evidence against evolution, would you mind just skipping your planned lecture series and give us any evidence you have_for_ Intelligent Design? Proving that 2+3 does not = 4 is not the same thing as proving that 1 +1 = 4, as my science and math teacher told us back in 6th grade, so where is the arduous scientific evidence for what you believe to be the truth? I dont believe my post was a response to you, and I post on my own clock. I was merely pointing out the many false predictions based on the observable evidence. Whether you are willing to admit these were false predictions is really not the point. I cant make up historical data, and everything I cited is on the record. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/139 "2012-09-10T20:40:36Z")
> [@THEMAYAN](#): > > I dont believe my post was a response to you, and I post on my own clock. I was merely pointing out the many false predictions based on the observable evidence. Whether you are willing to admit these were false predictions is really not the point. I cant make up historical data, and everything I cited is on the record. Don’t give a shit. Care to comment on the OP? ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2012, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024/140 "2012-09-10T23:44:59Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Ghod, this thread a left turn. Folks, could you please re-read the the first post and stick to the possibilities and evidence for I.D., and leaving any discussion about evolution(both pro and anti) for another thread? Thank you. Sorry for participating in the highjack… But… C’mon. The OP says to take Intelligent Design as a fact. Okay, sure: let’s do so. “Intelligent Design is a fact.” Dolphins and seagulls and hippos and gorillas didn’t evolve: they were crafted. Sculpted. They are the product of some form of conscious, deliberate, directed design. Whose? Well… (crickets…) There’s no evidence! We don’t have a set of blueprints with “Odin” signed at the bottom. We don’t have a message coded in our DNA, as they found in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We don’t got doodly. **Der Trihs** gave the best possible answer, way back in post #9. Aliens. At least this notion doesn’t violate any physical laws. What’s to discuss? If Aliens had built the Great Pyramids of Egypt and Yucatan, are they the same aliens, or different groups entirely? Did they use psionics, magic, or magnetic levitation based on the lines of earth’s magnetic sphere? Are the pyramids sexual, orgonic, or theosophical in nature? Gimme some straw dude, if you want me to make bricks! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/intelligent-design-whodunnit/633024.md?page=8)