Design for Living: The Basis for a Design Theory of Origins

Discovery Institute ^ | February 7, 2005 | Michael Behe

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Right Wing Professor]

LOL!

Clearly your post was created by a Higher Intelligence.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

The best evidence for ID so far is that alien species can interbreed with humans.

Vulcans, Clingons and Betazoids are all capable of successfully breeding with humans and producing viable offspring.

[Ichneumon]

You've just driven a stake into atheism. Nice work. Your posts should turn pink from embarrassment.

If atheism were actually based on the same sort of overarching claim of total knowledge that MacDorcha's post was, then you'd have a point, but since it isn't, you're just being your usual confused self. Run along and play, and stop wasting my time with your so-called "thoughts".

[Ichneumon]

[About 3.5 billion years ago, around sub-sea thermal vents.]

You observed this? You must be a lot older than I thought you were.

Can someone explain to me why so many of the anti-evolutioinsts subscribe to the moronic notion that the only way to determine what or how something happened is to personally observe it?

You guys don't even watch or understand "CSI" or any of the other forensics shows, do you? And I guess it must have been impossible to place O.J. Simpson at the crime scene, since all that evidence that he was there that night (DNA, etc.) doesn't count for squat if no one else "observed" him there right?

Haven't actually thought any of this through, have you?

When you get a clue how science actually works, feel free to come back and try again.

[Ichneumon]

Of course you do if you're an evolutionist. You believe nothing exploded without a cause and made the universe.

Grossly inaccurate cartoonish "summary" of the Big Bang scenario. Strike one.

You believe spontaneous generation.

Grossly inaccurate mischaracterization of abiogenesis. And since the evidence indicates that despite your personal incredulity (and without "magic wands"), that is indeed what actually happened, strike two.

You believe that infinites must be subsets of finites.

Now you're just babbling. Strike three.

And you're out.

Those magic wands are hard to hide.

What's actually "hard to hide" here is that you're trying to engage in a battle of wits while disarmed. Go learn something about science before you attempt to critique it, you're just making a fool of yourself.

[jwalsh07]

LOL, spoken like a true punk.

[PatrickHenry]

Can someone explain to me why so many of the anti-evolutioinsts subscribe to the moronic notion that the only way to determine what or how something happened is to personally observe it?

Were you active in these threads when I was accusing people of "craterism"? Doesn't matter, you've inspired me to bring back an oldie-goldie ...

---

The scientific case against Craterism

1. Meteor craters are not observed to be happening now.
2. Meteor craters have not been observed to happen in the past.
3. Thomas Jefferson said: "Gentlemen, I would rather believe that two Yankee professors would lie than believe that stones fall from heaven."
4. The odds against a rock falling from the sky in a random fashion and making a crater are astronomical.
5. The second law of thermodynamics prohibits meteor craters.
6. Meteor craters are not mentioned in the bible, and are thus blasphemy.
7. Meteor craters have never been reproduced in the lab, and are thus not scientific.
8. Belief that rocks can fall from the sky promotes hedonism and animalistic, amoral behavior.
9. Craterism is a product of materialism and a naturalistic worldview.
10. Craterism makes no predictions and is untestable; it is therefore not scientific.
11. Craterists point to evidence of micro-cratering, but have no evidence of macro-cratering.
12. Scientists are abandoning craterism because they know it is not supported by evidence.

[PatrickHenry]

Oldie-goldie placemarker.

[RobRoy]

>>It's absurd because it is NOT scientific.<<

Consciousness is not scientific. Noboby can quantify it or explain where it comes from.

It is not "scientific." Nor is it absurd.

[Dimensio]

Which is more simplistic, to believe that something was created from nothing by nothing

Evolution is not "something from nothing".

or that everything was created by SOMEONE?

What "SOMEONE"? How does this "SOMEONE" operate? What are its methods? What are its motives? How did it come to exist and how did it come to be in a position to create?

If creation is simplistic it is because evolution is impossible.

Demonstrating that evolution is impossible -- which you have not done -- would not validate any specific creation account.

[RightWhale]

A new name has popped up. Bruce Lipton. He says that consciousness or intelligence exists in the cells. Our bodies form according to a preexisting field made by our cells. Our bodies are like cities, communities of individual citizen cells that grouped for purposes of improved communication. He brings in the fractal theory of evolution.

This resembles the vortex theory of gravity which says that the planets form at preexisting concentrations of gravity--the gravity fields would be there even if the planets had not formed.

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

Howdy! In regard to your link: On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from biotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells, by William Martin and Michael J. Russell

The editor at Creation Safaris had the opportunity to ask pertinent questions of Dr. Russell at an event at JPL. Those questions and the responses can be found below, along with the editor's usual commentary that you love so much. :)

This reporter could not suffer bluffing to go uncontested, so he went up afterwards to talk to the speaker in person.  A series of questions nailed the bluffing to the wall:

• Chirality:  Like Benner, Russell admitted that 100% pure one-handedness is vital (see online book).  He admitted during the talk that amino acids racemize immediately (i.e., they revert to mixed-handedness).  His lecture had bluffed about heterochirality being acceptable at first, but he provided no means other than chance to achieve 100% homochirality later.  He seemed to assume getting a six-unit peptide of one hand was plausible, and that was sufficient (see next point).
• Information:  He confused chemical specificity with information when I charged him with pulling information out of a magic hat.  “The small peptides you propose are no more informative than a child’s alphabet blocks bouncing around at random,” I said.  When he tried to declare that a six-link peptide chain “has a lot of information, because it will only join with certain side chains and reject others,” I reminded him that such an arrangement provides no functional information (it doesn’t “do” anything useful—see 06/12/2003 headline).  Information is not the same as natural law.  I reminded him that sodium chloride (table salt) links up naturally, too, but provides no real information.  How much information is necessary to provide function?  As a real world example, he admitted that the simplest ferrodoxins are more than 53 amino acid units in length.  But that is an exceedingly high degree of information for just one protein molecule, especially when each unit has to be one-handed.  Getting something that size by chance is astronomically improbable.
• Genetic Takeovers:  I reminded him that Benner had warned against proposing too many genetic takeovers, because each one requires a radical overhaul of the conditions.  Compounding ad hoc conditions raises charges of telling a just-so story.  Yet his model invoked three takeovers: minerals, then peptides, then RNA.  He responded that the first two were “co-evolving.”  Reader, please ponder: does that really solve the problem?  Is it not a personification fallacy?
• Gaps:  He admitted that there is a huge gap between his proposal and the operation of the simplest living thing, especially considering the highly complex translation process between DNA and proteins involving transfer-RNA (see online book).  Yet he did not mention this gap during the talk when the audience was present.

If a layman can nail a PhD chemist, it doesn’t mean the layman is bright; it means the chemist’s story is weak and shatters easily.  After I hammered away with these pointed questions, he asked me in mild exasperation, “Well, you’ve got to start somewhere.  What is your model?”  “You wouldn’t like it.... ” I replied, then thanked him for his time and bid him adieu.  There wasn’t an opportunity to elaborate, and my model was not the issue.  Before you can get a horse to drink, you have to salt the oats; you have to create thirst, and get him to admit a need.  The horse will come to the water when licking the salt lick over and over doesn’t satisfy.
    Think about his last point.  To an evolutionist, proposing a just-so story is better than admitting ignorance.  It doesn’t matter whether it is highly implausible, or whether it contradicts (and essentially falsifies) other popular models, or whether it contains gaping canyons between the model and the real world (see 05/22/2002 commentary).  “What is your model?” – the question illustrates the assumption that something is better than nothing.  Is that always true?  Some people feel uncomfortable with silence and fill the air with verbiage.  But talk is cheap and sometimes less than worthless.  Telling a hungry hobo in a boxcar, “If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs,” is less helpful than shutting up.  Saying it with feeling is worse.  Jeffrey Kargel (see next headline) suggested that the decreasing evidence for life beyond earth should generate “an increased respect for life on our own planet.”  Calling life “failed mineralogy” and quipping “What does life do?  It makes waste” is profoundly disrespectful.  Evolutionists need more respect for life.  They need to silently ponder the complexity of DNA, RNA, proteins and molecular machines.  Only then we can reason intelligently about alternatives like intelligent design.
    So the first two lectures in a JPL series called “Life Detection Seminar,” have already falsified each other.*  In effect, they canceled each other out, leaving the audience behind square one, heading backwards.  Both models required highly implausible conditions.  Improbabilities do not add up to probabilities.  They multiply into impossibilities.

---

*Here is the abstract of Russell’s presentation from the advertisement, with comments inserted and emphasis added to highlight the speculative elements and logical fallacies.  Compare this model with Benner’s scenario last month (see 11/05/2004 headline).  Notice the personification fallacy as he assumes these chemicals were striving upward to bigger and better organization:

It is suggested [by whom? – identify yourself] that life got started when hydrothermal hydrogen reacted with carbon dioxide dissolved in ocean waters in a hydrothermal mound (pH ~10, T =100° C) partly composed of metal sulfide [life is more than chemistry; it requires specified complexity arranged for function].  This mound was the hatchery of life [misleading analogy] and the vent fluids bore life’s waste products back to the ocean.  Bacterial life is characterized by its wastes [reductionism], e.g., acetate, methane, oxygen and hydrogen sulfide.  The first waste product of life was probably [let’s see the calculation] acetate.  So we may think [who’s we?] of the hydrothermal mound as a natural hydrothermal flow reactor in which iron and nickel sulfides catalyzed the formation of minor concentrations of amino acids [you’re gonna need a lot of 'em, baby] and their polymerization to short peptides [Whoa! peptides do not form in water easily] – peptides that got caught in pore spaces while most of the acetate was eluted to the ocean [ad hoc; how convenient the good stuff lingers, while the bad stuff escapes].  These peptides wrapped themselves around inorganic metal sulfide and phosphate molecules [ad hoc], and also coated the inside of the pores [story’s over; now it’s a death trap].  The efficiency of the acetate generator was optimized by the emergence [sic] of the first organic living cells [Whoa! He just jumped the canyon in a single bound!] through the intervention of nucleic acids [Whoa!  Another canyon!  Where did they “emerge” from? – the same conditions are hostile to nucleotides] in the metabolizing system [systems are built by intelligent design].
    The hydrothermal mound continued to support a community of cells through to the community’s evolution and differentiation to bacteria and archaea [evolution always assumed; does he have any idea how complex these critters are?].  The archaea added waste methane to the effluent.  From the mound the only safe escape route was down [only intelligent agents care about safety], down into the ocean floor where nutrients and energy were still available.  Any cells discharged to the ocean would have starved [only intelligent entities suffer hunger].  Thus the ocean floor sediments and crust were colonized and the deep biosphere was born. [Presto!  Now clap for the magic show.]

Link

[longshadow]

So I'm cranking up the ping machine ...

"Amplify the ping machine!" - Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life, Part I: Birth"

[longshadow]

Chuck Missler makes at several outright blunders here.

Here's another:

What is particularly astonishing about this "dark matter" is that it apparently constitutes about 95% [sic] of all the matter in the universe!

He can't even get the ordinary/dark matter/dark energy distribution correct. He's off by roughly a factor of 4.

If Missler wrote that in a paper in Astrophysics class, he'd have gotten an "F."

[longshadow]

delicious

[Doctor Stochastic]

"Grove Karl Gilbert, the first person to conduct a full scientific survey of the mysterious crater in the Arizona desert, was the most renowned geologist of his generation, and has been described as "perhaps the closest equivalent to a saint that American science has yet produced."

Gilbert claimed this couldn't have been formed by a falling rock.

This crater: , which may have been observed being created, wasn't caused by a falling rock either.

[PatrickHenry]

Yes! Craterism is a theory in crisis! Scientists are running away from it. Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, all were non-Craterists!

[jennyp]

LOL!

Clearly your post was created by a Higher Intelligence.

SO high it took a professor to get it! :-)

[jennyp]

Wow. That must be REALLY old - from before late 1998. I love it!