NationStates Jolt Archive

This topic is not about whether intelligent design is accepted science. I just want to ask people who support intelligent design what technological advancement can be achieved using intelligent design. I've seen all through the debates of intelligent design and evolutionary theory but I have not seen anyone discuss any technology being developed from intelligent design.

This topic is not about whether intelligent design is accepted science. I just want to ask people who support intelligent design what technological advancement can be achieved using intelligent design. I've seen all through the debates of intelligent design and evolutionary theory but I have not seen anyone discuss any technology being developed from intelligent design.

Umm, what? Intelligent design is about the origin of life. I don't understand what technologies you are talking about. And I sense a trap,

Umm, what? Intelligent design is about the origin of life. I don't understand what technologies you are talking about. And I sense a trap,

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v453/GMCMA/Other%20stuff/1122608969434.jpg

It is a trap. The point of it is that since intelligent design has no natural mechanism and is untestable, it's useless for scientific inquiry. I guess comparison is to things like evolutionary theory predicting antibiotic resistance and such.

This topic is not about whether intelligent design is accepted science. I just want to ask people who support intelligent design what technological advancement can be achieved using intelligent design. I've seen all through the debates of intelligent design and evolutionary theory but I have not seen anyone discuss any technology being developed from intelligent design.


Darwin himself set the standard when he acknowledged, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." We can call such an event, if it exists, an "irreducibly complex" occurrence.

Intelligence should leave behind some sign, or characteristic, in the product of it’s creation, and a good detective should be able to find a ‘fingerprint’ of that existence at the scene of the crime (if you will), evidence of that intelligence. As we call this ‘fingerprint’ evidence an "irreducible complexity" not to be confused with a specified complex event. This will not be easy though.

So far we think the events we’ve seen in the real world of biology and natural sciences exhibit something less than irreducible complexity, or so we perceive them to be anyway. We can call these complex transitions something less than irreducible but still complex, thus, “specified complexity.” The difference from irreducible complexity and specified complexity may seem subtle at times but it is all important. Repeated random events may produce an occurrence that are not necessarily easy to reproduce: Note that complexity in the sense of improbability is not sufficient to eliminate an event from specified complexity, such as, flip a coin enough times and you'll end up with an eventually highly improbable sequence of falls, like 100 direct heads. But even so, we know that the coins tosses are chance and therefore unable to be called an irreducible complex event.

And thus, natural sciences have not ruled out Evolution via irreducibly complex organs or organisms, yet. On the other hand, the very essential ‘first’ spark of life, the very essence that MUST have occurred or exist as an event in the ancient past, but sometime after the creation of the universe at longest or formation of the planet and youngest. We have a 3.5 billion year old estimate for life on earth, but we don’t know when or where it came from. Every conceivable attempt has been tried to duplicate the conditions of what we think the young earth environment was like but the events on earth that could have created the very first spark of life eludes us entirely. We have tried to assemble the events to show this occurrence as a specified complexity event, but it has failed, and continues to fail. Will it always fail? Is the original spark of life on the planet (or universe) an irreducible event, is it the only irreducible event? Does ID need to have more than one irreducible event to be proven right? Can evolution afford even one non-specified complex event and still be right?

I don’t have those answers. But neither does the ID nor the Evolution side of the argument. At the very least, neither theory has been proven to be right on the single event that started the whole thing. So to answer your question, ID predicts that there are irreducibly complex events (or event) that can't be reproduced without intelligent intervention. Science can and will test this simple formula, by trying to reproduce the events of primordial earth, if we can show that life can come from non-life by the 'flipping' of the coin (whatever that coin might consist of) or if life is only reproducable by building it ourselves or not reproducable at all (building it by hand would be intelligence etc., but building the environment and letting life happen/occur on it's own would then prove ID wrong. If it can't be done, then ID is proved right (but when is 'can't ever proved?)...

At the very least, neither theory has been proven to be right on the single event that started the whole thing.

ID is not a theory, it is not even a hypothesis! ID is simply an idea.

Darwin himself set the standard when he acknowledged, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." We can call such an event, if it exists, an "irreducibly complex" occurrence.

No, irreductable complexity as defined by Behe and his like refers to a system where all components depend on the presence of each other for the whole to function; if one is not there, the rest is useless. If such a structure exists, so Behe's logic goes, and we can't figure out how it could have come about, it must have been designed [argument from design / appeal to ignorance], therefore there must be an intelligent designer [non sequitur, the designer need not be intelligent].

The trouble is, that kind of 'irreductable complexity' not only does not indicate an intelligent designer [since real engineers build technology to be robust, not so it resembles a house of cards], it's not actually a barrier to evolution either. It only shows that the mechanism in question did not evolve by the addition of single parts with no change in function.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB200.html

Irreducible complexity can evolve. It is defined as a system that loses its function if any one part is removed, so it only indicates that the system did not evolve by the addition of single parts with no change in function. That still leaves several evolutionary mechanisms:

* deletion of parts
* addition of multiple parts; for example, duplication of much or all of the system (Pennisi 2001)
* change of function
* addition of a second function to a part (Aharoni et al. 2004)
* gradual modification of parts


All of these mechanisms have been observed in genetic mutations. In particular, deletions and gene duplications are fairly common (Dujon et al. 2004; Hooper and Berg 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000), and together they make irreducible complexity not only possible but expected. In fact, it was predicted by Nobel-prize-winning geneticist Hermann Muller almost a century ago (Muller 1918, 463-464). Muller referred to it as interlocking complexity (Muller 1939).

Evolutionary origins of some irreducibly complex systems have been described in some detail. For example, the evolution of the Krebs citric acid cycle has been well studied; irreducibility is no obstacle to its formation (Meléndez-Hevia et al. 1996).