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Intelligent Design - theory, examples, implications


Lolic

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Hemoglobin - a scientific look into the improbability of the random formation

 

Our DNA/RNA coding system arranges amino acids into specific sequences to form each required protein. Only a specific sequence of amino acids will produce the required result.

 

Hemoglobin is responsible for both the red color of our blood and for the oxygen chemistry based on our breathing. There is one specific sequence of the amino acids that is hemoglobin. Hemoglobinopathy occurs if even one amino acid is replaced; it is usually lethal. (Sickle cell anemia is one example.)

 

Considering alternate linear arrangements of these amino acids indicates that there are about 10 to the 650th power permutations possible, but only one of them is hemoglobin.

(The actual number is 7.4 x 10 to the 654th. Some of the amino acid positions may be "neutral," like spaces, which are less significant. in which case the specificity would reduce to 7.9 x 10 to the 503rd.)

 

A reasonable finite approximation for infinity. The likelihood of this specific sequence occurring by chance is clearly absurd. (In speculating about obtaining this precise sequence by 10 to the 500th+ random trials, remember that there have been only about 10 to the 17th seconds in the generally accepted age of the universe.)

 

Hemoglobin shows very good evidence of being skillfully designed.

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These odds only apply if there are no other factors that would influence this outcome. In probablilty theory, prior probabilities can affect outcomes to the point that "astronomical probablities" are reduced to absolute certainty. Hemoglobin may cause problems for the host organism if any particular element of them changes, but if hemoglobin did have that difference, the host organism never would have been around to utilize it in the first place.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

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Another sign of Intelligent Design is the bacterial flagellum. There are 40 parts to this molecular machine, only 10 of which are similar to other existing structures. This leaves 30 pieces comprised of proteins that need to be coded for in the DNA, produced, transported in the proper sequence, and assembled in the proper order. Without one of the 40 parts, the apparatus is without value. Macro evolutionary theory cannot account for this, but this fits the definition of Intelligent Design.

 

This evidence takes a theory (macro evolution),

test it (can macro evolution account for this item),

finds it cannot account for the flagellum,

and finds the flagellum does provide evidence for Intelligent Design.

 

If the above information does not make sense, than some study into "irreducible complexity" and "specified complexity" will probably help a great deal.

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Its really considered bad form to post the same item to multiple threads. It makes you look like you're trying to get people to avoid reading the responses to your posts. My response to this is here: http://www.hypography.com/scienceforums/showthread.php?p=22965#post22965 and I agree with Maddogs post in that thread as well.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

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Hemoglobin - a scientific look into the improbability of the random formation

 

And who said hemoglobing formed de novo randomly? Not scientists.

 

And you might want to consider this...

 

"There is also another protein, called myoglobin, that is very similar to hemoglobin except that is has only one protein chain, not four, and therefore binds only one oxygen. The question is, if we assume that we already have an oxygen-binding protein like myoglobin, can we infer intelligent design from the function of hemoglobin? The case for design is weak. The starting point, myoglobin, already can bind oxygen. The behavior of hemoglobin can be achieved by a rather simple modification of the behavior of myoglobin, and the individual proteins of hemoglobin strongly resemble those of myoglobin. So although hemoglobin can be thought of as a system of interacting parts, the interaction does nothing much that is clearly beyond the individual components of the system. Given the starting point of myoglobin, I would say that hemoglobin shows the same evidence for design as does the man in the moon: intriguing, but far from convincing." (Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, Free Press, 1996, p207)
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Another sign of Intelligent Design is the bacterial flagellum. There are 40 parts to this molecular machine, only 10 of which are similar to other existing structures. ...

 

If the above information does not make sense, than some study into "irreducible complexity" and "specified complexity" will probably help a great deal.

 

Been there...done that :-)

 

Now, exactly what 30 parts do you claim are found only in the bacterial flagellum and are not similar to other structures?

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Its really considered bad form to post the same item to multiple threads.

Hi Buffy,

To much heat on the other thread for not staying on the topic of evolution and not only looking at the scientific aspects of it. So began a thread for this. To begin I posted two items that I believe are relevant and a reasonable starting point. Sorry if that doesn't suit you.

 

Guess I would have felt rather foolish starting out with a title and a blank post!

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but if hemoglobin did have that difference, the host organism never would have been around to utilize it in the first place.

 

But we are around, and we have very complex biological systems that integrate quite well.

 

If you went to a lab, design house, software house, etc and ask them to design and build you a "human" they would laugh you out of the office.

 

systems

complex systems

complex systems with feedback

complex sytems with feedback and reproduction capability

 

We've got it all.

 

you take those specifications (for a human) to a chemist and they say it's designed,

 

you take them to a software house and they say designed,

 

you take them to the biology department and they say oh that evolved over billions and billions of years! From the Goo to You via the Zoo.

 

If you want to believe that, you have to free will to do just that. You have a different world view than I do. Because of that, you see incredible odds after incredible odds and still believe it could all happen by chance. To me, that is ignoring the evidence.

 

I believe there is ample evidence to demonstrate design. I use to believe otherwise but I was open to what I looked into and followed the evidence.

 

It only takes a reasonable faith to believe in intelligent design based on the evidence.

I don't have enough faith to believe that evolution is responsible for the diversity and complexity we see in life.

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but if hemoglobin did have that difference, the host organism never would have been around to utilize it in the first place.
But we are around, and we have very complex biological systems that integrate quite well.
Yep, that's the point. You keep stating the odds are astronomical when in fact the confluence of the various factors makes it quite likely that things work together. They could work differently, but they'd be coordinated in that configuration. By arguing probablility in isolation, you draw misleading conclusions, based on well accepted principles of statistics and probability.
If you went to a lab, design house, software house, etc and ask them to design and build you a "human" they would laugh you out of the office.
Check out the Star Trek episode "The Changeling:"

 

"This is one of your units creator? It is inefficient and fragile and lacks basic protection and mechanisms for self-repair."

"It serves me as is, you will repair it"

 

"That *unit* is a woman."

"A mass of conflicting impulses."

 

If it was designed, it sure wasn't designed very well!

If you want to believe that, you have to free will to do just that. You have a different world view than I do. Because of that, you see incredible odds after incredible odds and still believe it could all happen by chance. To me, that is ignoring the evidence.
This gets at the crux of why ID is not taken very seriously, its only basis is to try to say that because we don't understand how something happens, it must have been designed. Go back a couple hundred years, and birds flying had to have something to do with angels lifting them. Or for primitive societies, every earthquake and tornado is God shaking the ground. To justify something simply by saying "we don't know *now* how this could possibly be" does not in and of itself provide any sort of evidence that an outside force (or pre-existing intelligence as James Putnam likes to talk about here), caused anything. Violating the basic principles of well understood disciplines like statistics does not make claims of "astronomical probabilities" so.
It only takes a reasonable faith to believe in intelligent design based on the evidence.
I agree with that! It definitely takes "faith" and not logic!

 

Cheers,

Buffy

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If you went to a lab, design house, software house, etc and ask them to design and build you a "human" they would laugh you out of the office.

 

1) With only a very small number of exceptions, labs, design houses, and software houses would laugh at you if you asked them to design and build a Pentium IV CPU.

 

2) You'd be asking those people to build something that is not their area of expertise. A TV repair person would laugh at you if you asked him to do brain surgery, and a brain surgeon would laugh at you if you asked her to repair your TV.

 

3) You'd be asking those people to make something that comes at the very end of long series instead of what would have been at the beginning of the series. That's kind of like asking someone in 1980 (or better, 2000 BC) to build you a Pentium IV CPU. So what happens when we look at something more akin to the simplest life? Well, scientists have created a vius from scratch. And Craig Venter (and others) have plans to try to construct a bacterium from scratch: they can't do that yet, but who's to say someone can't succeed 50 or 100 years from now?

 

Lolic: You have a different world view than I do. Because of that, you see incredible odds after incredible odds and still believe it could all happen by chance. To me, that is ignoring the evidence.

 

Uhm, I can't speak for Buffy but it appears you might be stuffing words into her mouth. YOU see incredible odds after incredible odd ... have you asked her how incredible she thinks it all is?

 

****************

Edit. Buffy and I must have been working on our responses at the same time. After I posted, I saw she had replied first. And she does NOT see the incredible odds after incredible odds that Lolic says she does.

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If it was designed, it sure wasn't designed very well!

This gets at the crux of why ID is not taken very seriously, its only basis is to try to say that because we don't understand how something happens, it must have been designed. Go back a couple hundred years, and birds flying had to have something to do with angels lifting them. Or for primitive societies, every earthquake and tornado is God shaking the ground. To justify something simply by saying "we don't know *now* how this could possibly be" does not in and of itself provide any sort of evidence that an outside force (or pre-existing intelligence as James Putnam likes to talk about here), caused anything. Violating the basic principles of well understood disciplines like statistics does not make claims of "astronomical probabilities" so.

I agree with that! It definitely takes "faith" and not logic!

 

Cheers,

Buffy

 

I do take ID very seriously. That is because we know intelligence exists. Everything else we think we know is the product of intelligence. There is no known cause for intelligence. It takes faith to believe that mechanical forces can cause intelligence. Unless you know how this happens? How do mechanical forces, any of them, give rise to intelligence? What is your theory?

 

James

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There is no known cause for intelligence. It takes faith to believe that mechanical forces can cause intelligence.

There you have it: "There is no known cause for intelligence," therefore it could not have been evolved or created by "mechanical forces." The two counter-arguments to this are:

  1. There are in fact theories and evidence, which are explained away by ID as being "our inability to perceive the universe objectively because of photons deceiving us," or by simply ignoring the evidence.
  2. Even where the evidence is not entirely conclusive, it is amusing to see the statement that this "must be the result of intelligent design" being refuted when new theories and more evidence ends up showing exactly how these "miracles of science" occur.

I actually applaud your approach James, because at least you try to come up with theories of your own to attempt to prove some theories of physics wrong, instead of simply changing the subject when faced with evidence. I think we'd all like to understand better what the flaws are that make the development of intelligence by mechanical means "impossible" or even "improbable." The explanations in Evolutionary theory of how intelligence evolved are well-developed and need not be represented here by me, but misusing statistics (which was my point in this thread), or endlessly asking "why?", or using the circular reasoning of "there must be a cause of intelligence (or unity of the universe), and since science does not provide a cause it is inadequate, therefore there must be a cause that did not come from mechanical causes or evolution and therefore there the universe was intelligently designed" does not refute these theories or the evidence that exists.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

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Hemoglobin - a scientific look into the improbability of the random formation.

 

Lolic,

 

please do not take this as an offense. When I pointed out the need for a scientific abgle, I really meant it. I, just like IrishEyes, welcome the discussion of ideas.

 

ID tries very hard to "debunk" evolution. That is fine, each to his own. But - and this is the very important part I need to get across here - there are some criteria to meet before something is considered scientific.

 

First of all, things must be logical. If we know that something (P) leads to another (Q), then we can use induction to assume that everytime P happens, then Q will also happen. If P, then Q. However, we cannot know that Q happens every time we see P. So we need to understand *why* does P lead to Q, and why does it sometimes not.

 

We also need to understand consequenses. Why does Q happen because of P? Are there any outside agents that act upon P so that if they are present, P will lead to Q, but of they are not, P will not lead to Q?

 

When we study this, we must formulate theories which helps us understand the relationship between P and Q. We must study where P comes from, which properties P has, which properties Q has, and what triggers the events that makes P and Q related.

 

Bascially, we must use our theory to make experiments that can show us how the relationship between P and Q works. We must then be able to use our theory to make predictions of the kind "If given A and B, then P will lead to Q". We must then make new observations to see if this is correct or not, and then either start over or move on depending on the level of success.

 

When we gather evidence, we must be aware of our own bias (that of human beings), and also bias which is not necessarily obvious (like is all data collected at the same time of day, month, year), do we forget that there might also be variants of P (P1, P2, P3 etc).

 

The results of this will be a theory about the mechanisms which drive the P and Q relationship. In order to disprove this theory, one needs to perform the same experiments and see if different results occcur. One also needs to explain why other interpretations of the data is more valid than the original one.

 

This happens all the time. This is how science works. It is called the Scientific Method and is a basic requirement for everyone who wants to study science.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

 

What you have presented is not science but an attempt at logic. If you want to show how evolution is wrong, you can not simply present examples of things that shows "this cannot be true". You need to show the steps taken to understand how this understanding came about. Until such information is provided, this is not a discussion about the science of ID but about the attempted debunking of evolution by ID. That is why it will always go around in circles.

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Well, scientists have created a vius from scratch. And Craig Venter (and others) have plans to try to construct a bacterium from scratch: they can't do that yet, but who's to say someone can't succeed 50 or 100 years from now?

 

TeleMad,

I would not be surprised to see more success in this area. What would be a key ingredient in this success? The intelligent application of information, biochemical expertise, etc. In short, properties of Intelligent Design would be used.

 

I don't expect to see a repudiation of the second law of thermodynamics with matter organizing itself into states of higher organization unless there is some form of intelligence design involved providing the information that enables the organization. I realize you view this differently.

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It takes faith to believe that mechanical forces can cause intelligence. Unless you know how this happens? How do mechanical forces, any of them, give rise to intelligence? What is your theory?

Excellent point James. Experience shows us that intelligence comes from a mind, so after observatin after observation, it's logical to deduce that other signs of intelligence came from a mind unless proven otherwise.

 

There certainly are other paths that lead to ID besides the teleological or design arguement. Care to branch into the Cosmological or Moral Law issues?

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please do not take this as an offense. When I pointed out the need for a scientific abgle, I really meant it. I, just like IrishEyes, welcome the discussion of ideas..

So now that I have left the "evolutiion" thread and I'm in the "philosophy and Humanities" thread, can other issues be discussed?

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