I’m not interested in debating intelligent design or a string of sarcastic replies, so there is no need for that. I have questions about this hypothesis and if anyone knows the stereotypical ID response, please post it up.
What interaction does the designer have with genetics? It seems that there are several ways to manipulate DNA
selective breeding
intentional mutations
swapping genes and chromosomes among species
Perhaps more. What all methods are practiced in ID? Is the designer seen as encouraging selective breeding, or inflicting specific or random mutations on DNA? What about gene swapping across species or anything like that? Does the designer intentionally mutate specific parts of DNA for a long range goal, ie does it mutate a single base pair in a DNA strand and intentionally change it from a C to an A?
Why did it take so long for complex life to develop? It took 2.5 billion years for single celled life to evolve into multi cellular life, and hundreds of millions of years for single celled life to develop photosynthesis. The argument of irreducible complexity seems to imply that there is a goal to evolution and intentional changes. However humans have been practicing intelligent design with goals on agricultural plants & animals and we have accomplished alot in short periods of time. I am currently reading a book that claims that dogs can be bred out of foxes in under 20 years by selective breeding. In the 6000-ish years that humans have been breeding plants and animals we have made massive changes, all dogs alive are ancestors of a specific kind of wolf, corn is evolved from something that is the size of a thumb, wheat is totally different than it was originally, etc. Now that we are starting to understand things like intentional mutations, selective mutations or gene swapping the diversity we can create is growing much faster. Why did evolution take so long with a designer? It isn’t going to take humans with an advanced knowledge of DNA 2.5 billion years to evolve multicellular life out of prokaryotes. Prokaryote DNA is about 5 million base pairs, eukaryote DNA is much longer and can run into the billions of base pairs, however if one were to intentionally convert prokaryotes into eukaryotes it shouldn’t take 2.5 billion years.
My mistake. I think eukaryotic life is about 1.7 billion years old, I meant converting prokaryotic life into eukaryotic multicellular life shouldn’t take 2.5 billion years if it is done intentionally.
One of the problems with the issue, (and the one that will prompt the sarcastic replies that you would prefer we avoided), is that most advocates for ID do not even propose a mechanism for the (not really wink wink *nudge nudge) Divine intelligence to interact with the physical.
I have never seen anything on the topic of “how” from Behe and people like Dembski and Johnson are too busy attacking Evolutionary Theory to come up with their own “scientific” hypotheses.
It will be interesting to see whether any mechanism has been proposed, but I suspect this will be a short thread.
Stop asking “what do conservative/religious people believe” and nutrition questions, willya? You’re going to make me look like a stalker.
Before your questions can be answered, first, think back on why ID was developed. We all know the answer–it has nothing to do with empirical evidence; no scientist would say, “I’ve objectively looked at all the evidence and I conclude some alien designer, not a supernatural one, somehow ran a master puppet show for most of our earth history, helpin gevolution along and then fled the coop just after creating humans.”
People who claim to believe in intelligent design fall in two camps.
Laymen who can’t quite understand how pond scum became a world of 6.5 billion people. Not usually religious fanatics, just people who don’t have a good understanding of science, such that “godidit” makes more sense to them than “pond scum -> man by pure chance”. They won’t have a response to your questions.
Young earth creationist fanatics.
Point being, if you can name an IDer that actually believes in what ID claims, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. There’s no one out there who takes ID as a serious scientific discipline such that they will exclude the possibility that the Designer is supernatural, except for maybe a few conspiracy nuts who believe in alien abductions.
That being said, I suspect that IDers will say, “there’s no such thing as mutations. If you’re seeing seemingly duplicate or extraneous DNA across species, that’s simply an artifact of the fact that engineers will use patterns and build upon completed works to create new ones.” As for how they actually put splice the DNA together to make a new species, they might say it’s out of scope for ID. That’s how they have to explain it, because all IDers believe in a Supernatural entity. Godidit–but they won’t admit it.
Sorry if this answer isn’t helpful. The fact is that ID as a science is not developed. It amounts to no more than a few books consisting of trite analogies such as the mousetrap and the bacteria flagellum that panders to the laymen. And it will never be developed, because any scientifically-inclined (an adjective very loosely used) people will be trying to prove YEC, not ID. ID promoters are politicans trying to make YEC more palatable to the public.
Wesley – if the ID folks were to actually propose something, it could be falsified. They do their best to stand on the sidelines and don’t get involved in any of the science stuff. ID is completely a political approach and has no relevance or basis in science.
An intelligent designer could have been involved in all, some, or none of the steps. The only criteria right now seems to be that said designer left no discernable trace of its work.
To answer your second question, evolutionarily, if you believe the endosymbiotic theory, it was a few pretty big steps that created eukaryotic life. It is a pretty huge junction. ID wise, I could also propose all kinds of things as to why a designer would wait – particularly given theories about the composition of the early atmosphere and the actions of prokaryotes to change that.
The selective breeding that you mention has phenotypically changed the organisms quite a bit, but not genotypically. Things like kernel size in corn, body size in dogs, and other phenotypic characteristics revolve around only a handful of genes that can be selected for or against across generations. Comparing selective breeding to evolution is like comparing dynamite excavation to microsurgery. That said, I’d bet if you gave chihuahuas and great danes a few tens of thousands of years of not interbreeding with no gene flow between the two populations and you may see random divergence enough to lead to a speciation of sort.
The point that needs to be undestood is that as far as we can tell as soon as a lifeform of a given level of complexity could exist it did exist. We don’t know how long it took to get to multicellular life because some the first evidence we have of life is of multicellular or at least communal stromatolites. Thus it seems like life became multicellualr almost at once. Multicelluar eukarytotes took alottle more time, but that’s understandable since you need a lot of single celled eukaryotes to support a multicelluiar one. Once again as far as we can tell they arrived as soon as they could be suported.
The same goes for phs. It took a long time for true phs to develop because it needs a shielding ozone layer to occur. It took a long time for the Erath to genertate sufficient oxygen abiogenically to allow phs to evolve and generate the rest, but as far as we can tell as soon as phs was possible it evolved, seemingly overnight.
Not really. you can generate freindly neotenic foxes in thatperiod but they ar enot dogs and still aren’t suitable candidates for domestication since they lack any pack instinct.
The standard repsonse has always been that God is a gardener, not a farmer. If you have agrden you plant seeds and you want to see them grow and flower. That is part of the joy of gardening, watching the process unfold. Very few gardeners would be happy to stick plactic flowers in their gardens even if they were totally indistinguishable from the real thing. For much the same reasons God wanted it to take time for the world to grow and develop.
There’s no inherent flaw in that position if we acept that God, sorry, the Intelligent Designer, isn’t just in it to produce results, but rather to enjoy the process leading to those results.
Wouldn’t the proponents of Intelligent Design “argue” that the Almighty didn’t take billions of years to create life because the Earth is only about 6,000 years old? To them, this is no problem.
Um, no. How is intelligent design even remotely compatible with young-earth Creationism?
dre2xl got it right; the young-earthers don’t believe in intelligent design at all. It’s a tool some of them are cynically using to slide their nutty beliefs into the public discourse. It’s the thin end of the wedge.
**Tomndebb **got it. IDers criticize alleged flaws in evolutionary science, but they don’t offer up a real hypothesis of their own. They don’t propose, for instance, that the Designer is some super genius alien living on one of Jupiter’s moons and working in an incredibly sophisticated genetic engineering lab. And they offer no hypothesis concerning how the Designer came to be, either. One must assume that said Designer is either not “irreducibly complex” or was in turn created or engineered by yet another Designer who was not.
This is actually the biggest problem with ID; everybody will tell you what it isn’t (“It isn’t creationism!”), what it doesn’t do, what it doesn’t claim, what it doesn’t predict, etc. Very few people can give a lucid anser to the question of what it is, what it does, etc. But of course existing in that way makes debating it like nailing jello to a tree; you simply cannot seem to get an IDist to make any kind of testable proposal.
In some of my discourses with IDists, I have come across those who claim that they simply don’t have all the answers, but that’s OK, because mainstream scientists also say they don’t have all the answers.
So it does all typically roll back to repeated irreducible complexity hurdles; nothing much is said about the properties or actions of the designer, because it is claimed that the science of ID is in its infancy and they need to do more research…
Personally, I doubt that they ever will bother to do the research, even if a method could be drawn up. I realise this isn’t the kind of answer the OP was looking for, and I apologise for my disdainful reply, but the answer to the question is no firm claims about the nature, action or properties of the designer are made, for if they were made, they might be refuted.
One could say that the Creator determined that matter behaves in the way it does, from the prime particles upwards so that In The Beginning there was the Big Bang, and in the fullness of time the Earth formed - and the Creator knew that it would - and the conditions were just right for life so life developed, because the laws of the universe as set out by the creator said so. And eventually humans developed. Sentient and sapient. And the Creator gives them little moral nudges every so often - Mohammed, Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, Eli, Abraham, and back into prehistory. The fact that it takes billions of years to get to the present doesn’t matter, because the Creator is by definition outside of Creation. The ‘Seven Days of Creation’ being allegory. And, of course, the Creator doesn’t have to explicitly create life: he’s set things up so that life comes along automatically.
But aside from the ‘little nudges’ statement, how do we differentiate the universe between an active Creator and a passive, disinterested, one? Or there being one at all? Or God / Jehovah / Allah / whoever being hyperdimensional creatures toying with us? I think it was Asimov who said that sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic; my corrollary is that any sufficiently strange experience is indistinguishable from the supernatural.
I think it boils down to whether or not you believe: if you do, then I’d suggest that the theory I’ve just presented is better than most. Despite being invented in the past 30 minutes.
This, however, is one description of Theistic Evolution, not Intelligent Design.
ID requires the “nudge” at particular places and claims that it can identify the places where the “nudge” occurred (although without proposing a mechanism for the “nudge”).
Michael Behe, whose Irreducible Complexity is a lot closer to a scientific approach to ID than either Johnson’s philosophical cavil’s or Dembski’s bad statistics, actually accepts Darwinian Evolution in general, simply insisting on little nudges at those events where his imagination fails him.
Theodosius Dobzhansky, who pretty well established the neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution, probably would have no problem with the passage I have quoted.
That is actuaslly a bit unfair to Ussher, who was not arguing for that point. Given the lack of clarity following the Flood in Genesis and matched against the fact that it is 5766 in the Jewish calendar and that Bede’s calculation would have made the creation 5958 years ago, his date of 6010 years ago is not outside the realm of possibility. Given that he was argung for a universe with an origin, and not an eternal universe, and not trying to set dates beyond which we are not permitted to explore, most of the criticism of Ussher is as ill-founded as the blind adherence that some in the current time accord it.
(See Gould’s essay “Fall in the House of Ussher” in Eight Little Piggies, Norton, 1993.)
But didn’t Ussher realize it was common for Jews to skip generations when listing genealogies? When it’s listed that somebody beget somebody, that didn’t necessarily mean father and son.
Even in the Gospels, there’s differences in the geneologies of Jesus. How can one just add up the years and come up with a hard figure?
Actually, that has been a recent explanation for some discrepancies, but it does not follow that that was the reasoning used at the time. The fact that Ussher, Bede, and the Jewish calendar are all within 300 years of each other indicates that his reckoning was fairly close to the reckoning believed accurate by others. If the “generation skipping” was real, then the Jewish calendar should show dates much older than those of Ussher, not a beginning date that is 244 years closer to our time than that of Ussher. This is especially true since the reckonings do not generally fall apart during the “begats” (in Chronicles, not in Genesis, actually), but after the time of David, when the calculator has to reconcile differing traditions of events in Judah and Israel and attempt to coordinate them with events known to history from the Greeks (or Persian, Chaldeans, etc.) and then reconcile the approximately 400 years from the “accepted” time of Ezra and Nehemiah to the birth of Jesus. Ussher did make a scholarly effort to reconcile those dates, but his reckoning differed from others who had attempted the same thing.
And, again, Ussher was not attempting to set the official date of the Creation. He was writing a history of mankind and needed a terminus a quo. His calculations happened to wind up at October 23, 4004 B.C.(E.) Given the variables of the knowledge available to him, he did an OK job. It is not his fault that later publishers of the KJV happened to include his chronology in their sidebars.
I think this is more applicable to theistic evolution, not intelligent design. The supposed need for ID is that certain functions could not have evolved without specific design. A god that works by selection only should not have been able to create these either.
Wesley another question you could ask an IDer who would hold still enough is how often the designer is supposed to have intervened? Once per structure supposedly impossible through evolution? Whenever speciation occurs? At every birth? Once at the time of abiogenesis is clearly not sufficient, since then there would be no irreproducibly complex structure.
I wouldn’t hold your breath until you found such a person.
I could be wrong but one of the things that makes ID inherently non-scientific is that IDers do not propose any such mechanism (which could of course be tested scientifically).
Even though Behe’s claims of irreducible complexity have been thoroughly debunked, it would be junk science (at best) had they not been. It’s one thing to say: Hmmm, this is pretty complicated and we don’t understand all the steps yet. It’s another thing entirely to claim: This must have been designed since we don’t understand it. That’s the kind of “reasoning” that led pre-scientific societies to assume that lightning bolts were thrown by gods form the heavens. And I’m not joking or exagerating.
Hoping this won’t be too much of a hijack, or if it is that its quick… John Mace could you point me in the direction of some books that directly debunk Behe’s work, specially his book “Darwin’s Black Box”, which I enjoyed.
I don’t have the science background to get involved in this question unfortunately but as a christian who isn’t sold on evolution and enjoyed Behe’s book, I would be interested in the counterpoint.
