Re: Bad design

On Feb 10, 11:27 pm, Tom McDonald <kilt...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
killerlimpet wrote:
On Feb 10, 11:17 am, "J.LyonLayden" <JosephLay...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Friar Broccoli wrote:
On Feb 9, 9:42 pm, Treus <treusd...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Friar Broccoli wrote:
On Feb 9, 5:45 pm, Alan Wostenberg <awo...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Steve, you're identifying the agent detected by intelligent
design with the God of the bible. People who do that, do so
for theological, not scientific reasons. Theodicy is the
branch of theology that tackles your question. But Intelligent
design is more modest. Suboptimal design is still design,
after all.
 How does this take on Intelligent Design (ID) deal with fact
 that all these (suboptimal) designs follow the tree of descent:
 mammalian bats with hair not feathers,  marsupial cats (Tiger
 Quoll) and marsupial just about everything else concentrated in
 geographically isolated Australia?
 Why would the Designer design, in a way that looks exactly like
 a tree of descent with modification?
I don't know. Why wouldn't a Designer design it that way?
Because it looks exactly like what you'd expect (predict) if
there was no design at all.
I don't think so. If there were no design I'd expect us to be
intelligent 30 foot dinosauric reptiles, not weak-ass primates.

Why do you expect that? Please be explicit in explaining how you get
from IDer to intelligent primates, or from no IDer to intelligent
dinosnores. Do you think that evolution combined with widespread
environmental change, such as that caused by cometary or meteoric
impact, can not account for the extinction of (nonavian) dinosaurs
andthe rise of primates?

Perhaps you will have more success than I will at getting Joe to
explain himself. He loves these sweeping overview things, based
on some stuff he read (and then apparently stopped reading other
things that might conflict with the first stuff he read); but he
is not so much into explanations with evidence you can look up
yourself.

This is unfortunate, since some time earlier, in sci.archaeology,
he and some of us regulars there had some fairly decent discussions.

But he seems to have regressed into 'I read it somewhere, I
believe it, that settles it' mode. Which seems to include
avoiding direct answers, and assuming folks who question him are
part of the mainstream science conspiracy to make the world other
than what Joe wants it to be.

It's especially unfortunate because I, for one, would love to
have him explicate his ideas.



By the way, why do diseases kill just enough of a species to make it
evolve? Why doesn't a disease wipe out the entire planet? Why are
their always specimens who are immune?

I assume that you are talking about parasitic diseases, instead of,
for example, cancer, scurvy, or hemophilia. Remember that parasites,
being organisms, are subject to evolution too, and that there is
strong pressure not to kill all of your hosts- a parasite that does
dies too. As for immunity, why wouldn't genetic and environmental
factors almost guarantee that some individuals be immune to any given
pathogen?

So, the Designer should only design things that look designed?
 My problem is that all the the designs look evolved.  There are
 mountains of clear evidence for evolution, and no clear
 evidence for design.  Why would a designer go to such lengths
 to disguise His designs as evolutionary processes, if He wasn't
 doing the obvious, and using evolution as His design method?
He was using evolution as his design method. It is obvious that the
process of evolution is a fact. However, it is also obvious that the
process has been repeatedly tampered with.

I don't think it's obvious; please illuminate me.

Can you exclude the functional convergence whereby some
features of a designed structure happen to overlap those of
non-design?
Irrelevant.

 Well lets consider a murder investigation analogy:
The scene:
  Lying on the floor before us is the body of (the once
  relatively chaste) Miss Organism.
  She has innumerable stab wounds and remains impaled through the
  heart, directly below her once heaving bosoms.
What evidence do we have concerning her fate:
  Large chunks of Mr Natural Selection's (NS's) skin are under
  her fingernails and his finger prints are clearly visible on
  the dried blood of the knife, so we have a complete DNA and
  protein profile and everything points to Mr. NS.
  But there's more.  The estate in which Miss Organism was killed
  was filled with video cameras, in which we can see many (but
  not all) the knife wounds being inflicted.  Thus we know the
  exact order in which the blows were struck.  (This is the fossil
  record)
  In addition, most of the video cameras were attached to as
  many as 10 different atomic clocks, only a few of which were
  working in each camera, but all of which generally agree about
  the time and order in which the blows were struck.
  And evidence concerning motive: Miss Organism had all the
  money and was threatening to leave Mr. NS.  (In a now
  ridiculously forced analogy: we can put bacteria and fast
  breeding insects under severe pressure [chemical, heat, cold,
  food supply etc]) and cause all sorts of changes within a few
  generations and even break one population into two that can no
  longer inter-breed; ie effectively create new species].
  So we know that organisms respond to selective pressure.
 But Mr. NS's lawyer comes along and claims that it was actually
 Mr. Design what done the deed, but regrettably he doesn't have
 any supporting evidence.
 So, now here we are at trial and you're asking me if I can
 exclude the possibility that Mr. Design didn't dress up like
 Mr. NS, commit the murder, and then plant all of the other
 circumstantial evidence.
 Can you give me even ONE plausible reason why I should even
 consider such a nutty scenario?
Yes. Because your analogy is lacking in several different ways. It's a
terrible analogy.
For one, all your video cameras are capturing "evolution" but they do
not go back far enough to show the initial spark. We still don't know
why there even is an "evolution."

Sure, the evidence about the whys and hows of abiogenesis are not as
clearcut as in the analogy. Therefor let's throw up our hands and
declare that we'll never be able to figure it out, so it must have
been some shadowy IDer behind the scenes? That seems premature at
best.

The ancient philosophy of the "unmoved mover" is still as strong as it
was in Socrates' day. We all know there's such thing as evolution, but
what started it? You don't get something from nothing. Spontaneous
Generation was disproven in the 1800s.

With possible cosmological exceptions (I assume from your reference to
spontaneous generation and of the "start" of evolution that you are
concerning yourself with biology), no one is claiming to get
"something" from "nothing". The "initial spark" as you call it, the
first life or proto life, is not claimed to have simply appeared out
of thin vacuum, but rather from a biochemical background governed by
physical laws and chemical regularities.

The spontaneous generation that was disproved was that of modern life
forms such as maggots. Abiogensis does not propose that this is the
sort of early life that first arose and evolved, so the rejection of
SG is irrelevent here.

Secondly, your video camera would also have caught "Evolution"
miraculously surviving tens of thousands of near-death experiences for
no apparent reason. The sheer number of coincidences that enbled your
"evolution" to survive for the billions of years that led up to the
murder are evidence enough to anyone possessed of reason that some
unknown factor is at play.

I'm a little confused by your use of evolution as something that
survives. All evolution requires is an imperfect replicator; if
imperfect replicators exist, then evolution has, as I use the word,
survived.
Considering the resilience of life on earth, I rather doubt that there
has been anything approaching a "near death experience[]" for
evolution. What are these threats that life miraculously survived, and
would they be sufficient to simultaneously destroy:

Radioactivity resistant bacteria          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
Life on deep-sea hydrothermal vents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organisms_living_on_hydrotherma...
Bacteria that grow in very cold environments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychrophile
Bacteria that live inside rocks 2 miles underground
http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/99/1213/microbe.shtml

http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/extreme/endolith/general.html
Archea that thrive in boiling water
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrococcus_furiosus
Various life under Antarctic ice
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1647012_1416755,00.html

Also, your "evolution" on camera would have grown the appendages/limbs
that were just perfect to commit the murder with for no explained
reason, when the most intelligent members of the audience would have
predicted that the 'test tube" being would have evolved no limbs with
which to hold implements of murder at all.

Why do you think that evolutionary theory is incompatible with limbs,
and why do you think that the existence of an IDer implies or predicts
limbs? As for their perfection for committing murder, aside from
sticky questions about the motives of an IDer who designs its
creations to kill one another, isn't this rather like saying that my
face

Tom,
As you know, though I am not a moron, I do prefer common sense to
science. If my books become bestsellers perhaps I will be allowed the
time to re-research the factual basis of the things I have come to
accept as common sense, with documentation with which to impart the
'findings" to others. For now, my vague sweeps simply serve to argue
the existence of other possibilities. However, if there is a specific
non-general "factoid" that I have statedwithout a source which you
want me to try to provide one for, let me know and i will see what I
can do. But listing and scientifically explaining every coincidence
that I have seen in the evidence of evolution would be a task worthy
of money. The coincidences are obvious to me, and I have explained in
general why I see it that way. Explaining it meticulously ad infinitum
in such a way as to sufficient for doctorate level peer review is a
task I am not up to at the moment.
And as always, I commend you and thank you for your courteous style of
debate.



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