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To: Virginia-American
It's just a dramatic illustration of stupendously stupid design.

You have no evidence whatsoever to support this or any of your other assertions about the stucture of this nerve system.

Opinion isn't science. Ideas of tidiness are not science. Your comments and views actually sound like the arguments made in the pre-Darwinian period in that they emanated not from any experimental evidence but from pre-conceived concepts of what should be right (eg ideas of tidyness) based upon worldview.

197 posted on 05/22/2006 11:28:52 PM PDT by tallhappy (Juntos Podemos!)
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To: tallhappy
Opinion isn't science. Ideas of tidiness are not science. Your comments and views actually sound like the arguments made in the pre-Darwinian period in that they emanated not from any experimental evidence but from pre-conceived concepts of what should be right (eg ideas of tidyness) based upon worldview.

Quite so. If I restricted myself to arguing science, I would merely point out the fact that the recurrent laryngeal nerve starts out relatively straight and gets stretched as the heart plunges deeper into the chest, and the fact that there is a homologous nerve and blood vessel in all the chordates, and conclude that the indirect path it takes is yet more evidence for the evolution of mammals from "primitive" chordates.

Similarly for the other examples. Evolution is highly constrained by what it has to work with; there is no reason to suppose that a "designer" is so constrained.

However, I was more arguing against ID. The basic claim is that living things reflect a conscious designer. OK. Assume that.

This is not a scientific claim, as nobody has ever come up with a useful algorithm for detecting design. (Maybe someday Dembski will, but I remain skeptical, to say the least). So it's basically an intuitive, aesthetic assertion.

We know of no other intelligent designers than ourselves. To assert that the design reflects intelligence, we have only our own standards to go by.

The examples I gave, and the ones I linked to, show that the hypothetical designer is either 1) often incompetent, 2) has such wildly different standards than we do as to make talk of its "intelligence" meaningless, or 3) doesn't exist.

Since these anomalies all fit neatly into standard biology, Occam tells us to go with 3)

201 posted on 05/24/2006 2:42:35 AM PDT by Virginia-American
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