DNA has the following:
1. Functional InformationHow could such a system form randomly without any intelligence, and totally unguided?
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
1. EUGENICS
Eugenic racism in 1925 was consensus science in the field of human evolution. By 1928 there were 376 university-level courses on eugenics, and there was widespread support from scientists and other academics at leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, to name a few -- as well as enthusiastic support from media and government. Eugenic science was funded lavishly by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harriman Railroad foundation, and the wealthy businessman J.H. Kellogg. Many national and international conferences on eugenics and human evolution were hosted at leading research institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, and eugenic science gained the imprimatur of leading scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. Wealthy donors created the Eugenic Records Office on Long Island, later to become the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. By the 1930s, thirty-one states in the U.S. would pass compulsory sterilization laws based on mainstream eugenic science and human evolution, and eugenics would receive the explicit endorsement of the Supreme Court in 1926. By the end of the first half of the 20th century, sixty thousand Americans had been sterilized involuntarily on the basis of consensus eugenic science.…Racism and eugenics were the hallmarks of the theory of human evolution in the early 20th century, representing a clear consensus of evolutionary biologists as well as other scientists and leaders in higher education and government. There were a few dissenters, but such skeptics were disdained in mainstream scientific circles.
- Michael Egnor
Improvement of Man. - If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.Eugenics. - When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, that dread white plague which is still responsible for almost one seventh of all deaths, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science is of being well born is called eugenics.
Parasitism and its Cost to Society. - Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.
The Remedy. - If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country. - Hunter’s Civic Biology (the textbook at the centre of the Scopes Trial)
In the Darwin view of humans as animals, what would cause us to stop practicing animal husbandry within our own species? Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game. Scientific data is well supported in animal husbandry. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.
2. VESTIGIAL ORGANS
Excerpt: “The appendix, like the once ‘vestigial’ tonsils and adenoids, is a lymphoid organ (part of the body’s immune system) which makes antibodies against infections in the digestive system. Believing it to be a useless evolutionary ‘left over,’ many surgeons once removed even the healthy appendix whenever they were in the abdominal cavity. Today, removal of a healthy appendix under most circumstances would be considered medical malpractice” (David Menton, Ph.D., “The Human Tail, and Other Tales of Evolution,” St. Louis MetroVoice , January 1994, Vol. 4, No. 1).
“Doctors once thought tonsils were simply useless evolutionary leftovers and took them out thinking that it could do no harm. Today there is considerable evidence that there are more troubles in the upper respiratory tract after tonsil removal than before, and doctors generally agree that simple enlargement of tonsils is hardly an indication for surgery” (J.D. Ratcliff, Your Body and How it Works, 1975, p. 137).
The tailbone, properly known as the coccyx, is another supposed example of a vestigial structure that has been found to have a valuable function—especially regarding the ability to sit comfortably. Many people who have had this bone removed have great difficulty sitting.
3. JUNK DNA DISEASES
Uncounted millions of people died miserable deaths while scientists were looking for the “gene” causing their illnesses – and were not even supposed to look anywhere but under the lamp illuminating only 1.3% of the genome (the genes).”
Excerpt: By 2005 fundamental problems with underlying axioms of genomics became too obvious. Meanwhile, millions, if not hundreds of millions were dying of junk DNA diseases while 98.7% of the human DNA was officially still considered untouchable.
- International HoloGenomics Society – “Junk DNA Diseases”
In exactly the same way the founders of Science, Mendel, Pasteur, Newton, Faraday studied Science. They all believed hat God made things in an orderly fashion.
Generally good article. But this part doesn't make much sense.
I don't know anyone who expected to find evidence of life on Mars and has therefore been forced to drop back to expecting life to be present on exoplanets.
It's been pretty thoroughly known for upwards of 50 years that we are unlikely to find evidence of life in this solar system away from Earth.
Recent evidence is that planets and solar systems are common if not ubiquitous. It is likely that the basic conditions for life are also fairly common, which of course does not necessarily mean that life itself is.
“Denyse O’Leary” Ping
What you mean "we," Kimosabe?
Seriously: What need is there to prescribe how scientists should study Nature?
I assume that some scientists are proponents of "Intelligent Design," while others are not. So, why not let each individual scientist study Nature as he sees fit?
Astrophysicists who prefer to use Ouija boards - rather than established scientific theories - to predict astrophysical phenomena are free to do so.
Geologists who prefer to use "dowsing rods" - rather than logic based on established scientific theories - to find veins of valuable minerals are free to do so.
Chemists who subscribe to the "Phlogiston Theory" - rather than accepting the existence of oxygen - are free to proceed under those assumptions.
Etc., etc.
We'll see who derives the more useful findings.
Regards,
bookmark
Science long ago embraced empiricism and adopted the scientific method. If you want to change that, you should have something equally rigourous and objective to replace it with.
They’re at it . . . again.
They are right. They should stop looking for validation from people who don't understand the concept and just proceed with their own research. Even evolution requires an underlying formula, and information feedback loops.
A program that is self-adjusting is evidence of a master programmer. But I wouldn't waste time trying to convince someone who doesn't see it. Let them gather their data points and we'll make sense of them. You don't need their approval to proceed on the basis of what is rather self-evident after all. They are the ones looking at a 3D system in 2D. (Or would it be a 5D system in 4D?)
I am disappointed: when I read the title, I thought he was going to propose an actual ID-based research program. I’ve been waiting for someone to hypothesize what a moment of design would look like—where, when, and how the Designer inserted himself into the process—and how we might go about looking for it. Unfortunately, the proposal here is the same old approach of using “design” to fill whatever holes in our knowledge may still exist.
So what’s this about design? We are just bags of molecules in motion, constrained in our thoughts and actions by the laws of chemistry and physics. Free will is an illusion.
300 genes in the simplest of lifeforms, all coded to give the correct sequence of amino acids, all remarkably left-handed, to form proteins that fold just the right way, to perform needed functions. Turned on and off at the right moments. Disassembled and ejected when functions are complete.
Design? This incredible quality of assembled matter that we call life coded itself into existence, randomly generating the needed information. It was inevitable since everything is deterministic from the moment of the big bang. Time - anything can happen given enough time.
If mathematically impossible in “A” universe, it’s entirely possible, even probable, in infinite universes. We happen to be in the one out of essentially infinity where it all came together.
It’s all very scientific. Design to explain all of this? Only for the simpletons and the unscientific.
You know that, dear Heartlander; I know that.
But try to explain that to a materialist who has already decided that all this "evidence of a designing intelligence" is something to ignore in principle. ID is ruled off the reservation, because in the minds of its critics, it can only mean (bottom line) an overt or covert search for "proof" of the existence of a creator god.
The creator god, of course, is in their minds merely a primitive superstition of ignorant mankind. To blast the ignorant out of their complacency, they love to point to the absurdity of "special creation," wherein the creator god is presumed to have made all things, as James S. Trefil puts it, "laboriously, piece by piece."
But it seems to me that "special creation" might rather be understood as referring to a particular, unrepeatable event that initiates, ex nihilo, an evolving Cosmos from a singular beginning of space and time, of "matter," of life and mind, of the basic organizational rules physical and moral that maintain the Order of this Creation over time. Thus to me, the Big Bang/Singularity/Inflationary Universe model does not seem inconsistent with the idea of the creative Word (Logos) of God in the Beginning.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.But design theory per se is really not involved in such disputes, which are philosophical and theological at bottom. It's just trying to explain the accumulating evidence that the universe really cannot be exhaustively explained on the premises of materialist reductionism and mechanism. Life and mind (consciousness) seem to resist explanation on these terms.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men. — John 1:1–4
But hey, that's just me, just my view from where I stand. People see what they see from their own particular vantage point. But as Einstein reminds us, the physical laws are the same for all observers, regardless of where they stand.
I can see the other POV — the materialist one premised in reductionism. Here's James Trefil again [in The Moment of Creation: Big Bang Physics from before the First Millisecond to the Present Universe, 1983]:
We stand, in fact, on the verge of the ultimate triumph of the reductionist idea. Within a few years, we may very well realize that if we probe deeply enough, we will find a universe that is the ultimate in simplicity and beauty. All of the apparent complexity we see will be understood in terms of an underlying system in which particles of one type interact with each other through one kind of force. If this sort of theory is actually developed, it will be the culmination of a philosophical quest that began over two millennia ago in the Greek Ionian colonies....Thus the noble aspiration. But does it hold water? Certainly Trefil takes "simplicity" and "beauty" very seriously. But on the other hand, what in materialist reductionism can account for this, his particular personal predilection for/attraction to simplicity and beauty? And by what criterion are they to be defined?
The "instinct" for simplicity and beauty would seem to me to be irreducible to materialist terms. Thus I "hit the wall" of the same problem that keeps the design theorists up at night. (So to speak.)
Notwithstanding, I highly recommend Trefil's valuable book. He strikes me as an intellectually honest man. Responding to the hypothetical question "What About God?" (not the best-formulated question I've ever seen), he writes:
When I talk to my friends about the fact that the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed relentlessly back toward the moment of creation, I am often asked about the religious implications of the new physics. That there are such implications is obvious, particularly in the speculations about how the universe came into existence in the first place. Physicists normally feel very uncomfortable with this sort of question, since it cannot be answered by the normal methods of our science [Trefil is professor of physics at U-VA]. For what it is worth, I will give my own personal views on the subject here, with the caveat that these views may not be shared by other scientists.Just some "grist for the mill!" Must leave it there for now.
It seems to me that the unease people feel when they think about the sort of scientific advance implicit in the new physics arises from the notion that applying the techniques of science to the creation of the universe is somehow encroaching on terrain that has been staked out by religion....
...No matter how deeply we probe into any scientific subject, we will always find something unexplained and undefined....
...It now appears that our new discoveries of the laws that govern the nature of elementary particles may allow us to push the frontiers back to the very creation of the universe itself. This does not, however, alter the fact that there is a frontier. All it does is transfer our attention from the material form of the universe to the laws that govern its behavior. [Ed. note: Jeepers, that's what I thought design theory was doing....] I can hear a twenty-first century philosopher saying, "Very well, we agree that the universe exists because of the laws of physics. But who created those laws? [Ed. note: a bit of "question-begging" there IMHO; for we need not stipulate a "who" in advance; hypothetically, it could be a "what" {though ultimately, I personally doubt it}] And even if, as some physicists have suggested, the laws of physics we discover are the only laws that are logically consistent with each other (and therefore the only laws that could exist), our philosopher would ask, "Who made the laws of logic?"
My message, then, to those who feel that science is overstepping its bounds when it probes the early universe is simple: don't worry. No matter how far the boundaries are pushed back, there will always be room both for religious faith and a religious interpretation of the physical world.
For myself, I feel much more comfortable with the concept of a God who is clever enough to devise laws of physics that make the existence of our marvelous universe inevitable than I do with the old-fashioned God who had to make it all laboriously, piece by piece. [Ed. note: sorry to litter up the landscape with the "Ed. notes"; but I do have quibbles with some of Trefil's statements.... Itals added for emphasis]
Thank you so very much, dear Heartlander, for the ping — and for introducing me to Denyse O’Leary. Verrrrrry interesting! [Though I'm kinder to Max Tegmark than she is.]
Boy, this looks like a study in how to convolute, complicate, and confuse something that is relatively simple. ID is such a simple notion which opponents are unable to refute. Refuting ID is kind of like trying to refute the idea that a car had an intelligent, purposeful designer.
God created evolution.
God made the world and it is our job to figure it out. This idea by some people that think our only job is to believe in God and he will fill our bellies and prevent us from being sick is naïve and arrogant. He never said h would fill our bellies; he said he would provide the means for us to do it ourselves. This is a great world we live in and it has everything we need.
Study science just like anyone else, but with an open mind. That is to say, maintaining the possibility that some things may be beyond the explanatory capacities of science.