Unlocking cell secrets bolsters evolutionists

The Chicage Tribune ^ | Published February 13, 2006 | By Jeremy Manier Tribune staff reporter

[MRMEAN]

Biologists are beginning to solve the riddles on which intelligent-design advocates have relied

To advocates of intelligent design, the human sperm's tiny tail bears potent evidence that Charles Darwin was wrong--it is, they say, a molecular machine so complex that only God could have produced it.

But biologists now are starting to piece together how such intricate bits of biochemistry evolved. Although the basic research was not meant as a response to intelligent design, it is unraveling the very riddles that proponents said could not be solved.

In contrast, intelligent design advocates admit they still lack any way of using hard evidence to test their theories, which many biologists find revealing.

The new insights on evolution at its smallest scale were a major yet little-noticed reason why a federal judge late last year struck down a plan in Dover, Pa., that would have put intelligent design in public school classrooms. The findings the judge cited will provide the ultimate test of ideas about the origins of life, more lasting than court rulings or the politics of the moment.

Most scientists have long rejected intelligent design, or ID, on the grounds that it is a religious proposal not grounded in observation. ID adherents say biochemistry actually supports their view. They argue that many tiny mechanisms--the tails of sperm and bacteria, the immune system, blood clotting--are so elaborate they must have been purposely designed.

Yet biologists have made major strides on each of those phenomena since the first ID books were published in the mid-1990s.

Working without the benefit of fossils, experts are using new genome data to study how fish evolved the crucial ability to clot blood. A wave of new research on the evolution of the immune system seemed to stump ID witnesses in the Dover case. And even ...

[Thatcherite]

We've had cordial discussions in the past. You're an excellent debater and very bright gentleman, but you'll never get your points across until the Christian bashing from others stops.

You strike me as a reasonable person. You're an excellent debater and very bright gentleman, but you'll never get your points across until the scientist bashing from others stops, and there is a lot more scientist bashing than christian bashing in these threads.