[PatrickHenry]

As before, please try to keep today's trial news in this one daily thread.

Here's another good article from the same newspaper: Behe insists proof absent.

[PatrickHenry]

EvolutionPing

A pro-evolution science list with over 310 names. See the list's explanation at my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail to be added or dropped. See what's new in The List-O-Links.

[Sidebar Moderator]

do you have a link for this?

[Nextrush]

The good old York Daily Rectum. A source of factual information every day. I used to read about the Pope being
infallible, now science is infallible. We can't know for sure what the weather will be more than a few days ahead.
We change weather forecasts every six hours. But we know
what happened a long time ago for certain (evolution). When
I went to public school in York County 30 years all points
of view were presented. They even used the G word.

[Right Wing Professor]

Intelligent design and evolution proponents agree that a test on bacterial flagellum could show if it was or wasn't able to evolve, which could provide evidence to support intelligent design.

I have no idea what 'evolution proponents' would agree with this. No competent biological chemist thinks a flagellum could evolve de novo in 10,000 generations in a single bacterial culture.

[From many - one.]

read later

[connectthedots]

place marker

[connectthedots]

Here is a different perspective on what happened yesterday.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/index.php?p=929&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#more929

[Zeroisanumber]

Do these "evolution proponents" have a specific bacteria in mind? This seems a little off.

[Right Wing Professor]

The transcript of Behe's cross-examination (first part) is now up on the ACLU website.

On first reading, it looks like Rothschild made Behe contradict himself on several occasions, and otherwise look like a complete idiot. Devastating.

[theDentist]

"This is not the first time creationists have tried to get scientists to do their work for them," Scott said.

Well, if the creationists do it themselves, scientists will say it proves nothing because it wasn't done by scientists under strict guidelines and monitoring. And if it were, they'd say it only proves how that bacteria reacts, but not all of the animal kingdom.

Either way, it seems both sides have doubts about their own positions.

[AdmSmith]

I repost it here

Behe ... describes intelligent design as a fully testable, falsifiable scientific theory.

OK take these examples. Was it designed by an intelligent designer?

1. The vertebrate eye, with its "complexity" contains a basic flaw: The nerves and blood vessels of vertebrate eyes lie between the photosensitive cells and the light source, a design that no engineer would recommend, as it obscures the passage of photons into the photosensitive cells. Long ago, vertebrate ancestors had simple, cup-shaped eyes that were probably originally used only to detect light, not to resolve fine images. Those simple eyes developed as an out-pocket of the brain, and the position of their tissue layers determined where the nerves and blood vessels lay in relation to the photosesitive cells. If the layers had not maintained their correct positions, relative to one another, then the mechanism that control differentiation, in which an inducing substance produced in one layer diffuses into the neighboring layer, would not work. Once such a developmental mechanism evolved, it could not be changed without destroying sight in the intermediate forms that would have to be passed through on the way to a more "intelligent designed" eye.

2. Another example from the eye: the blind spot.

3. In the adult, cold-blooded ancestors of mammals, and in present-day mammalian embryos, the testicles are located in the body cavity, near the kidneys, like ovaries in adult females. Because mammalian sperm develop better at temperatures lower than those found in the body core, there was a selection, during the evolutionary transition from cold- to warm-bloodedness, to move the testicles out of the high temperature body core into the lower-temperaure periphery and eventually into the scrotum. This evolutionary progression in the adults is replayed in the developmental progression of the testes from the embryo to adult, and as they move from the body cavity towards the scrotum, they wrap the vas deferens around the ureters, like a person watering the lawn and gets the hose caught on a tree. If it was not for the constraints of history ond development, a much shorter vas deferens would have evolved, costing less to produce and probably doing a better job.

So, how many bad designs do we need in order to show that there was no intelligent designer, or did the designer had a bad day?