Questions about intelligent design

[tomndebb]

@Green_Means_Go

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’m not sure about a specific book. You can find several documents in and through the talkorigins.org web site:

A list of more books and papers than you would ever want dealing in Behe’s niche of biology.
Irreducible Complexity and Michael Behe
Reviews and Criticisms of Michael Behe’s book
Addressing Intelligent Design rather than Behe, specifically: National Center for Science Education’s paper The Elusive Scientific Basis of Intelligent Design

[matt]

@Blake

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.

Don’t want to hijack this too much, but that’s interesting. Do we not even have a ballpark date for abiogenesis?

@Blake

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.

How is oxygen produced abiogenically? Why can’t photosynthesis proceed in the absence of an ozone layer, if the organism has an appropriate UV-filtering pigment?

[Quartz]

@wolf_meister

Quartz
The quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” is by Arthur C. Clarke
Just thought I’d let you know.

Yes, of course. :smack:

[Quartz]

@tomndebb

This, however, is one description of Theistic Evolution, not Intelligent Design.

Hmmm… interesting. Of course, I concocted my theory very quickly, whereas the ID folks have invested vast amounts of time developing theirs.

[Green_Means_Go]

@tomndebb

I’m not sure about a specific book. You can find several documents in and through the talkorigins.org web site:

A list of more books and papers than you would ever want dealing in Behe’s niche of biology.
Irreducible Complexity and Michael Behe
Reviews and Criticisms of Michael Behe’s book
Addressing Intelligent Design rather than Behe, specifically: National Center for Science Education’s paper The Elusive Scientific Basis of Intelligent Design

Thanks!

[Blake]

@matt

Don’t want to hijack this too much, but that’s interesting. Do we not even have a ballpark date for abiogenesis?

The first signs of life show up about 3.8 billion years ago, so abiogenesis is usually put around 4 billion years ago. That is also about the point where the Earth is thought to have been cool and stable enough to suppoort organic life. So it appears that life appeared within a milion years or so of the planet being capable of suporting life.

How is oxygen produced abiogenically?

Water in the upper atmosphere is sheken to peices by high energy radiation. The hydrogen floats way into space leaving the oxygen behind

Why can’t photosynthesis proceed in the absence of an ozone layer, if the organism has an appropriate UV-filtering pigment?

The probelm is that there is no appropriate UV filtering pigment. If such a pigement existed animals and plants would be equipped with it. They aren’t Instead we run the risk of mutations so that we can see and photosynthesise.

In theory a specific UV filteirng pigment could evolve, but it never has. In a world without an ozone layers organsisms simply covered themselves in dark pigments or stayed at depth in the oceans, both of which work just fine so there was never a need for such a pigment. Only when organisms started photosynthesising was there a real need for a pigment that admitted visisble light but excluded UV, but natural selection can’t produce a trait that will only become useful after it already exists.