Posted on 05/02/2003 10:26:29 AM PDT by Remedy
According to Illustra Media, the Public Broadcasting System uploaded the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life to its satellite this past Sunday. For the next three years, it will be available for member stations to download and broadcast. In addition, PBS is offering the film on their Shop PBS website under Science/Biology videos (page 4).
The film, released a little over a year ago, has been called a definitive presentation of the Intelligent Design movement. With interviews and evidences from eight PhD scientists, it presents strictly scientific (not religious) arguments that challenge Darwinian evolution, and show instead that intelligent design is a superior explanation for the complexity of life, particularly of DNA and molecular machines. The film has been well received not only across America but in Russia and other countries. Many public school teachers are using the material in science classrooms without fear of controversies over creationism or religion in the science classroom, because the material is scientific, not religious, in all its arguments and evidences, and presents reputable scientists who are well qualified in their fields: Dean Kenyon, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Steven Meyer, William Dembski, Scott Minnich, Jed Macosko, and Paul Nelson, with a couple of brief appearances by Phillip E. Johnson, the "founder" of the Intelligent Design movement.
Check with your local PBS Station to find out when they plan to air it. If it is not on their schedule, call or write and encourage them to show the film. Why should television partly supported by public tax funds present only a one-sided view on this subject, so foundational to all people believe and think? We applaud PBS's move, but it is only partial penance for the Evolution series and decades of biased reporting on evolution.
This is a wonderful film, beautifully edited and shot on many locations, including the Galápagos Islands, and scored to original music by Mark Lewis. People are not only buying it for themselves, but buying extra copies to show to friends and co-workers. Unlocking the Mystery of Life available here on our Products page in VHS and DVD formats. The film is about an hour long and includes vivid computer graphics of DNA in action. The DVD version includes an extra half-hour of bonus features, including answers to 14 frequently-asked questions about intelligent design, answered by the scientists who appear in the film.
This is a must-see video. Get it, and get it around.
Intelligent Design Gets a Powerful New Media Boost
03/09/2002We highly recommend this film. Copies are just now becoming available for $20. Visit IllustraMedia.com and order it. View it, and pass it around. Share it with your teachers, your co-workers, your church. You will have no embarrassment showing this high-quality, beautiful, amazing film to anyone, even the most ardent evolutionist.
Vast Databases
At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion "chemical letters." This is enough information to fill 1000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it!
If all the chemical "letters" in the human body were printed in books, it is estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times!
This vast amount of information is stored in our bodies' cells in DNA molecules and is coded by four bases-adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. The key to the coding of DNA is in the grouping of these bases into sets that are further sequenced to form the 20 common amino acids. Together, these genetic codes form the physical foundation of all life.
We've all been exposed to the basic concepts of DNA and its double-helix structure in our high school biology classes. Perhaps you remember being taught that cells divide through the "unzipping" and subsequent replication of the double helix. In all likelihood, though, the incredible evidence of design in this process was not discussed.
A Complex Engineering Puzzle
Suppose you were asked to take two long strands of fisherman's monofilament line-125 miles long-then form it into a double-helix structure and neatly fold and pack this line so it would fit into a basketball.
Furthermore, you would need to ensure that the double helix could be unzipped and duplicated along the length of this line, and the duplicate copy removed, all without tangling the line. Possible?
This is directly analogous to what happens in the billions of cells in your body every day. Scale the basketball down to the size of a human cell and the line scales down to six feet of DNA.
All this DNA must be packed so the regulator proteins that control making copies of the DNA have access to it. The DNA packing process is both complex and elegant and is so efficient that it achieves a reduction in length of DNA by a factor of 1 million.
When the cell needs to divide, the entire length of DNA must be split apart, duplicated, and repackaged for each daughter cell. No one knows exactly how cells solve this topological nightmare. But the solution clearly starts with the special spools on which the DNA is wound.
Each spool carries two "turns" of DNA, and the spools themselves are stacked together in groups of six or eight. The human cell uses about 25 million of them to keep its DNA under control. 4 (As shown in Figure 3 on the previous page, DNA is wound around histones to form nucleosomes. These are organized into solenoids, which in turn compose chromatin loops. Each element in this complex, yet highly organized arrangement is carefully designed to play a key role in the cell replication process.)
Cell Replication
The details of cell replication are too complex to be described in detail here. A simplified outline is given below to illustrate the incredible process involved:
1. Replication involves the synthesis of an exact copy of the cell's DNA.
2. An initiator protein must locate the correct place in the strand to begin copying.
3. The initiator protein guides an "unzipper" protein (helicase) to separate the strand, forming a fork area. This unwinding process involves speeds estimated at approximately 8000 rpm, all done without tangling the DNA strand!
4. The DNA duplex kinks back on itself as it unwinds. To relieve the twisting pressure, an "untwister" enzyme (topo-isomerase) systematically cuts and repairs the coil.
5. Working only on flat, untwisted sections of the DNA, enzymes go to work copying the strand. (Two complete DNA pairs are synthesized, each containing one old and one new strand.)
6. A stitcher repair protein (DNA ligases) connects nucleotides together into one continuous strand.
Read and Write
The process described above is only a small part of the story. While the unwinding and rewinding of the DNA takes place, an equally sophisticated process of reading the DNA code and "writing" new strands occurs. The process involves the production and use of messenger RNA. Again, a simplified process description:
1. Messenger RNA is made from DNA by an enzyme (RNA polymerase).
2. A small section of DNA unzips, revealing the actual message (called the sense strand) and the template (the anti-sense strand).
3. A copy is made of the gene of interest only, producing a relatively short RNA segment.
4. The knots and kinks in the DNA provide crucial topological stop-and-go signals for the enzymes.
5. After messenger RNA is made, the DNA duplex is zipped back up.
Adding to the complexity and sophistication of design, the genetic code is read in blocks of three bases (out of the four possible bases mentioned earlier) that are non-overlapping.
Moreover, the triplicate code used is "degenerate," meaning that multiple combinations can often code for the same amino acid-this provides a built-in error correction mechanism. (One can't help but contrast the sophistication involved with the far simpler read/write processes used in modern computers.)
Feel free to provide quotes, since you imply a familiarity with their works.
By "things" I assume you mean life on earth. I'll let you in on some secrets so you can join the Evilutionist ConspiracyTM.
#1 How life came to be on earth is unknown at this time (although there are many interesting speculations).
#2 The advent of life on earth may or may not have resulted from an evolutionary process.
#3 However life may have come to be here, evolution is a very well supported theory for its subsequent development over the last few billion years.
There now, since you're part of the ConspiracyTM you too can sigh and roll your eyes when yet another deevolutionist posts that the origin of life on earth has some necessary bearing on the validity of the theory of evolution.
Thanks for the laugh.
The second law of thermodynamics does not forbid the reversal of entropy per se, a point many people miss. It only forbids the reversal of entropy in the absence of a positive enthalpy gradient. As it happens, the earth has never had a shortage of positive enthalpy gradients, either a billion years ago or today. The sun provides most of that, and to a lesser extent nuclear decay and other enthalpy sources.
To put it another way, in addition to life, diamonds are also "impossible" unless positive enthalpy gradients reverse entropy, and there is no shortage of diamonds in the universe (de Beers notwithstanding). Quite frankly, the vast majority of non-living matter on this planet is also the result of some measure of entropy reversal by the same mechanism.
This is an ironic weakness of evolutionary algorithms and the like. They could produce incredibly powerful artifacts but they'd be so complex we couldn't understand how they work.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
(And it definitely doesn't imply what you think it implies.)
Here is one name I was refering to.
This is a quote from an article by Professor Arthur B. Anderson:
Isaac Newton believed that the Bible is literally true in every respect. Throughout his life, he continually tested Biblical truth against the physical truths of experimental and theoretical science. He never observed a contradiction. In fact, he viewed his own scientific work as a method by which to reinforce belief in Biblical truth.
and
In addition to his scientific work (Newton would have said as a part of his scientific work), he devoted a substantial portion of his enormous energy to the study of the Bible and Biblical texts and history. He read the Bible daily throughout his life and wrote over a million words of notes regarding his study of it.
Sounds like a quote from Princess Bride.
Still are
and evolutionists were uniformitarian.
No, they weren't. Hell they weren't even strict uniformitarians in 1859. Darwin recognized that extinctions and other sorts of discontinuities would leave their mark on the evolution of life.
Everyone is now catastrophist.
No, they aren't. The introduction of punctuated equilibrium is hardly equivalent to being a "catastrophist". And again, Darwin foreshadowed this in 1859, although many people didn't give it full appreciation until Gould et all stressed its contribution. Darwin wrote, "A number of species, however, keeping in a body might remain for a long period unchanged, whilst within this same period, several of these species, by migrating into new countries and coming into competition with foreign associates, might become modified; so that we must not overrate the accuracy of organic change as a measure of time."
Which group had to change?
Care to try again?
I think a better assessment of your perspective would be:
Man can have more success in engineering complex systems the more he reverse engineers God's handiwork. God has a better engineering degree than "nature" + "time".
That's fine, because the way most people picture it isn't really consistent with what we do know anyway. In fact, there is only one relatively rare geological formation that is known to bootstrap extremely complex organic molecules at an incredible rate. These are certain types of hydrothermal systems with an unusually rich range of minerals and metals in the surrounding rocks. The only such systems in North America that I am aware of have been discovered in Nevada.
The point being that these types of systems are actually capable of producing the necessary molecules found in living organisms and are energetic and active enough in the catalytic sense that it is a constant cauldron of molecular synthesis. In fact, there are a number of interesting molecular analogs found in these systems, including very close analogs of cellular wall structures found in the most primitive of single-celled organisms, which are produced by a very complex catalytic reaction between certain abundant organics and certain minerals in the rocks. If we were talking about life spontaneously forming in the ocean or by a lightning bolt I would agree, but these types of peculiar hydrothermal systems make it look very viable indeed. There is quite a bit of interest in these systems scientifically, but they are pretty rare largely due to very few regions of the planet having a sufficiently rich and complex mix of minerals and metals.
That old double helix is just too different from anything non living and did not bubble out of a pond IMHO.
DNA is a nice system, and a fairly complex one. However, it is worth noting that there have been many, many self-replicating "genetic" molecular systems discovered by chemistry that don't appear in any lifeforms. DNA is just one of many (nearly infinite) chemical structures with its properties; one could argue that if it wasn't one, it would be another.
Because they indeed did have scales:
What's the new theory now?
Same as it's always been. Who's been filling your head with more nonsense? You've been reading the creationist screeds again, haven't you?
Feathers, right?
On the branch of the dinosaur family that evolved to birds, yeah.
I believe socialism is a political system that has been adopted by evolutionist training governments. The God of the Bible tells us that we are important to Him as individuals, whereas evolution produces groupthink to increase chances of survival.
If the end comes at death everyone is a victim of this cold hard world. Victims seek solace from the group.
If the end has eternal life in store, the fear of failure and death are significantly diminished. Adventuresome capitalistic behavior becomes more attractive. Fiefs no more, no matter the consequences. Be gone you Red Coats!
Actually, he denied the divinity of Christ, insofar as he felt that Christ was subordinate to God the Father, and considered Trinitarianism to be a false doctrine. In fact, he wrote a book about exactly that, entitled "A Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture," but realized it would be too dangerous to publish it in England under his own name. He tried to get John Locke to have it translated and published in France, but Locke wasn't able to make the necessary arrangements, and so it was never published. But it makes a nice Isaac Newton fairy tale to say that he was a strict Christian and Biblical literalist, doesn't it?
I would hope so. The biological systems that we see in nature are shoddily designed abominations of engineering that could be improved by most second-rate engineers with a shred of design sense. It is very evident that there was no design spec for most critters. "Functioning" and "well-designed" are two different things. At least when we do evolutionary processes for system engineering we have engineers do QA to make sure gross design defects don't get through.
No, when looking at the internals of human biology it is abundantly clear that no man could have designed such a machine.
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