What is scientific about ID?

Post Reply New Topic

I don't believe my holding a belief is proof of anything. The evidence for God is ALL AROUND US, IN EVERY DIRECTION.

If you cannot see that, then you are blind.

How does one empirically establish the probability of complexity happening in the absence of a sentient agent when one attributes all instances of complexity to a creator?

You have a gift for understatement. The articles I looked at when Ragtime first posted the link were merely poor. Now I looked for a few minutes more and found some that show either profound incompetence, or the presence of a pro-evolution mole in the team, who slips in ridiculous articles to undermine the site. I particularly like Life from Non-Life is a statistical improbability, the part about "The Amazing Protein". There are two paragraphs with a short description of what a protein is. So far, so good. Then comes this:

That's it. No evidence or argument. What follows is a different argument under a different heading, the old irrelevant calculation how improbable it is to get a specific 100 amino acid sequence in a single step.

A similar gem is Evolution says Spontaneous Generation True but Science Says it's false. The part about the maggots is most fun. The best estimate is that it took billions of years from the first unicellular life to the first multicellular, but if multicellular life doesn't show up spontaneously in one jar in a few weeks, that is supposed to be evidence it can't happen.

I looked at a few more articles that were similarly ridiculous. Ragtime, if you read this site before you linked to it, and you thought it could improve anyone's knowledge of evolution, then your ignorance of evolution exceeds my wildest imagination. This site is an embarrassment to anyone who opposes evolution and has a rudimentary understanding of science. It is a goldmine for anyone who wants to portray opponents of evolution as complete idiots. Just what were you thinking when you linked to it?

well, the hardest thing about brain biology... is that you need live brains to research... which is pretty hard to get... fMRIs are startin to do some pretty col stuff so i bet things will be be gettin there quicker.

the other hard thing about deducing the connectivity of it all... is that neurons are frggin small. (i've gotten to poke inside of some in my classes!) but in a physiological setting, you're lucking to poke into one, to see what's going on... it's rare, but there are some researchers out there that can poke into two and three connected neurons to see how they interact... but those are only of a specific type of neuron (the big ones, lol)... and that's hardly indicative of how a network of 10 billion works. this is why the filed is incorporating computational research... we're compiling a database similar to the genome project that samples real recordings from neurons from as many brain regions as possible and sharing worldwide so tha computational people can try to build a (stable) brain.

really cool stuff

@ gromit

actually multicellularity is thought to have evolved roughly 7 times independently across all the groupings of organisms... so it's not as linear of a development as "we all came from THE one single-cell organism"... but it is thought that they all occurred through the mechanism of endosymbiosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory

didnt read through the wiki but am assuming it's pretty ok

Did a quick scan, that's the evolution of eukaryotes, not multicellularity. If I remember correctly, eukaryotes also came quite late, and I don't remember how long it took from there to multicellular life (I am thinking of organisms with obligatory cell differentiation, not the optional differentiation you sometimes see in slime molds).

That reminds me, here's an interesting paper on slime molds.

yes... technical glitch... but that's what i mean... gettin to the multicellular bit... can't have multi-celled bacteria

edit: argh... and i meant that the eukaryotes that ---> multicelled (~ 7 independant times) also have diff lineages, which is why we don't all come from the ONE cell (hence multiple endosymbioses)