Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

But, blobpet, this is why the ID folks have an easier time claiming victory than the anti-ID folks. See, if you're someone who thinks that science is a reasonable way to address things, you have the tendency to try to back up your claims with evidence and make well-reasoned arguments. The ID folks have no problem ignoring data that don't fit into their world-view and re-shaping questions to serve their needs.

In general, this is something that a lot of the anti-science people do very well: they just ignore anything that doesn't help them and hammer their points over and over again. Moreover, when the pro-science folks make an attempt to address their point in a reasoned way, they either ignore the argument or just say that it's not good enough, without any real justification.

Actually, there are interesting parallels between the ID/anti-science crowd and the conspiracy theorists (i.e. aliens, moon hoax, 9/11 consipiracy), but that's probably a discussion for another thread. . .

 

The Ten Commandments established the duty not to have any other gods before a certain deity. The death penalty was imposed upon "He who sacrifices to any god, other than to the LORD alone." That is hardly consistent with the principle that all men are created with an equal right to religious liberty.

 

That's because the ID folks follow the Religious Method, which is similar to the Scientific Method, except the steps are performed in reverse order. First, form a conclusion...

 

Without the source, you can't prove the fact. To say it was designed, you have to be able to show that there's something directing the designing. If I say the Man In The Moon is responsible for the tides, it's not enough to prove that tides have a lunar cause.

The basis of ID is that there is a designer. In this case, to prove design a designer must also be proved.

Also, how do you actually prove the design (irrespective of a designer)? Again, it's not enough to say that "evolution doesn't have an answer for this, so it must be designed". To say something is "so complex is must have been designed" isn't science. It's a cheap way out.

I'm not arrogant enough to say there is or isn't a designer or god or whatever you want to call it. It can't be proved or disproved. I just don't see how the hypothoses surrounding ID are testable & verifiable. Therefore I don't consider it science. And I don't think it belongs in science classes.

 

ID (aka creationism) had an opportunity to present its case in Kitzmiller vs. Dover (See the NOVA DVD "Judgement Day"). In several instances it was clearly recognized ID witnesses lied on the witness stand. The ID folks went so far as to state that astrology is science. Other entries here recognize the differences between ID and science. ID starts with a conclusion and presumes a supernatural designer. Science starts with a hypothesis and is always falsifiable. Science only accepts what it cannot disprove (null hypothesis) and keeps testing. Science is concerned with process, not origin. Origin would be nice to know, but a reproducible process is often more important.

 

The first white men to illegally immigrate here and steal land from the Indians in the northern part of our country killed their children for not properly honoring their parents.

 

And scientists don't consider it science. Not on the basis of testability.

What is wrong with Intelligent Design?
By Elliott Sober

Testing Is Comparative
To develop an account of testability, we must begin by recognizing that testing is typically a comparative enterprise. If ID is to be tested, it must be tested against one or more competing hypotheses. Creationists now single out evolutionary theory as their stalking horse. Before 1859, the competing theory was the vaguer idea of "chance" -- that a mindless random process is responsible for the complex adaptations we observe. The details of these alternative hypotheses do not matter to the problem at hand, but they contribute an insight into the kinds of observational consequencesthat a formulation of ID needs to have if it is to be tested against its competitors.

For example, if mini-ID says that an intelligent designer made the vertebrate eye, and this claim is to be tested against the claim that chance produced the vertebrate eye, we must discover how these two hypotheses disagree about what we should observe. Since both entail that vertebrates have eyes, the observation that this is true does not help. We need to find other predictions that mini-ID makes.

Testability
ID asserts that somewhere on the causal chains leading up to "complex information" there is an intelligent designer at work. If a newspaper contains complex information, ID proponents are not obliged to say that the press used to print the newspaper is intelligent; presumably, the press is just as mindless as the paper it produces. Rather, their claim is that if you look back further along the causal chain, you'll find an intelligent being. And they are right -- there is a person setting the type.

If scientists observe that "purely physical antecedents" at time t9 give rise to complex information at t10, this does not refute the ID claim any more than a mindless printing press does. ID proponents will simply maintain that an intelligent designer was present at an earlier stage.

If scientists press their inquiry into the more remote past and discover that mindless physical conditions at t8 produced the conditions at t9, ID proponents will have the same reply: an intelligent designer was involved at a still earlier time.

If scientists somehow manage to push their understanding of the complex information that exists at t10 all the way back to the start of the universe without ever having to invoke an intelligent designer, would that refute the ID position? Undoubtedly, ID proponents will then postulate a supernatural intelligence that exists outside of space and time. Defenders of ID always have a way out. This is not the mark of a falsifiable theory.
Conclusion

It is one thing for a version of ID to have observational consequences, something else for it to have observational consequences that differ from those of a theory with which it competes. The mini-ID claim that an intelligent designer made the vertebrate eye entails that vertebrates have eyes, but that does not permit it to be tested against alternative explanations of why vertebrates have eyes. When scientific theories compete with each other, the usual pattern is that independently attested auxiliary propositions allow the theories to make predictions that disagree with each other. No such auxiliary propositions allow mini-ID to do this.

It is easy enough to construct a version of ID that accommodates a set of observations already known, but it also is easy to construct a version of ID that conflicts with what we have already observed. Neither undertaking results in substantive science, nor is there any point in constructing a version of ID that is so minimalistic that it fails to say much of anything about what we observe. In all its forms, ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.
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Full text available online at:
Quarterly Review of Biology
University of Chicago Press - Cookie absent

Talkreason
Talk Reason: arguments against creationism, intelligent design, and religious apologetics

 

Wildkow, please explain methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus and how ID explains that the bacteria has become resistant to methicillin? Would it be correct to say it has evolved? This over only a short 50 years, imagine what could happen over millions of years.

What is methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)?

Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus is a bacterial infection resistant to antibiotic methicillin. Staphylococcus aureus, sometimes referred to simply as "staph," or "staph A" is a common bacterium found on the skin of healthy people. If staph gets into the body it can cause a minor infection such as boils or pimples or serious infections such as pneumonia or blood infections.
One antibiotic commonly used to treat staph infections is methicillin. While methicillin is very effective in treating most staph infections, some staph bacteria have developed a resistance to methicillin and can no longer be killed by this antibiotic. The resistant bacteria are called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus or MRSA.

 

Wildkow, please explain methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus and how ID explains that the bacteria has become resistant to methicillin? Would it be correct to say it has evolved? This over only a short 50 years, imagine what could happen over millions of years.

What is methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)?

Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus is a bacterial infection resistant to antibiotic methicillin. Staphylococcus aureus, sometimes referred to simply as "staph," or "staph A" is a common bacterium found on the skin of healthy people. If staph gets into the body it can cause a minor infection such as boils or pimples or serious infections such as pneumonia or blood infections.
One antibiotic commonly used to treat staph infections is methicillin. While methicillin is very effective in treating most staph infections, some staph bacteria have developed a resistance to methicillin and can no longer be killed by this antibiotic. The resistant bacteria are called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus or MRSA.

 

No, we've been explaining our rejection to you. If you want to class ID as philosophy, that's fine. I have no objection at all to ID as a philosophy. But it's not science.

In regard to looking at something and seeing that it's designed, frankly, I have an easier time imagining a creature -- say, a dolphin -- evolving slowly over time than instantaneously materializing as though it were beamed down from the Starship Enterprise.

Regarding testability, see my earlier post in this thread.

Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and ID is full of cherry-picking and disingenous arguments. Try looking at some of the chapter reviews at The Panda's Thumb
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design Review - The Panda's Thumb

You're redifining words to win your argument.

In biology, evolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next.

Origin of Life = abiogenesis
There is no evolutionary theory concerning the original development of life from non-living chemicals, since this topic falls outside of the framework of the evolutionary model. The question of origins belongs to an entirely separate biological discipline known as "abiogenesis", which is the province of bio-chemists rather than of evolutionary biologists.

While Darwin did talk about abiogenesis in letters later in his life, it is not cosidered part of evolutionary theory, which mainly concerns natural selection.

Scientists. If you need to redefine what science is to fit ID into it...then perhaps ID isn't science.



Science generally functions along the following fundamental assumptions.

1. There exists an objective material world that is governed by immutable and consistent laws that act without exception.
2. The proper instrument for discovering these laws and the nature of the substance upon which they act is human intellect aided by observation, experiment and reason. ("Observation and experiment" are understood to include eyes, ears, nose, etc., and all the extensions thereto commonly called scientific instruments. "Reason" is understood to include logic and mathematics.)[8]
3. Such laws can be discovered, or at least approximated.

Crisis points have occurred so many times in the history of science and were eventually overcome. Anyone who says, "OK boys and girls, this is the end," should be regarded not only with the most active skepticism, but as ignorant of history as well. If, on the other hand, science as we know it had failed abjectly, and for millennia, to solve even the most straightforward problems, we would be justified in asking whether the game (as designed) had any meaning at all. But that's not what we see.

This is nicely illustrated by a striking, though not unique, anecdote from physics. Einstein found quantum theory's prediction of randomness at the heart of certain physical events deeply disquieting, and he mounted many attacks on the theory. In 1935 he, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen published a paper in which they scrupulously followed the mathematical formalism to what they regarded as an absurd conclusion. By now you can guess the result; decades later their "absurd" effect was shown to actually happen. It is now known as entanglement, and has been demonstrated many times in many different situations.

In designing his attacks on quantum theory, Einstein carefully stayed within the rules. In doing so, he wound up contributing materially to the progress of physics. If instead he had simply said, "an intelligence did it," those contributions would have been lost. If physics generally had taken that path, it would have been the end of the road.

 

So again, you need to change the standard and accepted definition of evolution in order to make your argument work.

from the FDA:

Most frightening, however, is resistance acquired from a small circle of DNA called a plasmid, that can flit from one type of bacterium to another. A single plasmid can provide a slew of different resistances. In 1968, 12,500 people in Guatemala died in an epidemic of Shigella diarrhea. The microbe harbored a plasmid carrying resistances to four antibiotics!
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Thankfully, the author of the paper you quote isn't involved in drug development. Those studying the problem of antibiotic resistance arrive at quite different conclusions:

In fact, some organisms with antibiotic-resistant phenotypes and genotypes seem to be fitter than their susceptible counterparts23, 24, 25, 26, and compensatory mutations have been observed that allow the resistant organism to retain its fitness level27.

Much of this assumption is based on the expected fitness cost of maintaining the resistance gene(s). Recent studies indicate that the maintenance of resistance might not impose a significant fitness cost23, 24, 25, 26 or that this cost can be overcome19, 20, 21, 27. However, there is also a large background pool of resistance, probably a result of the fact that many resistance genes protect the bacterial cell in such a way that they are likely to be functional against other compounds in the environment. It should therefore not be surprising that these resistance genes are found in 'pristine' areas that lack anthropogenic disturbance. Many of these genes are ancient on an evolutionary timescale and have perhaps been modified to protect the cell against human-produced antibiotic compounds.
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Some of the manifestos in this thread quite are reminiscent of the writings of one Ted Kaczynzki, compiled in his unheated shack in Montana.

Is prisoner # 04475-046 back in circulation?

 

. . . . . . and driving a Prius? :car:

 

Maybe it's one of those delirious non-information gaining mutations.