Comments on: ID is da bomb!

By: Diskmaster

Diskmaster — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 20:05:02 +0000

If Intelligent Design is so bad it will fail on its own. ID people believe that they are informed, so why not debate, you know facts not attacks, prove them wrong. Stop acting like idiots. Refusing them a voice or informing them you will never convert them to your way of thinking. Don’t attack the person just the information that is presented or you will never bring bring anyone to your side.

By: Tony Kehoe

Tony Kehoe — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 09:50:56 +0000

“There are moths (canâ€™t remember the specific species) in the UK that were once mostly whiteâ€¦ as soot, from industrialization started to cover many things, the white moths were selected for elimination and a dark/black strain became predominant as the white strain was more easily picked off by predators.”
The moth in question is the Pepper Moth (Biston betularia), as studied by the late Bernard Kettlewell.
HTH.

By: Varun

Varun — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:42:52 +0000

These days pinging og blogs are also on the go

http://www.exploreuniverse.com

By: Don Marti

Don Marti — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:42:16 +0000

Why not link to a neutral article about Intelligent Design instead?

By: Irishman

Irishman — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:14:23 +0000

Viggen, you make some good additional points.

By: Fernando JR

Fernando JR — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 00:23:14 +0000

Forget Intelligent Design.
The Real Threat is Intelligent Falling!

http://theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4133&n=2

By: Viggen

Viggen — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 22:29:35 +0000

> Just to clarify, I did not mean to imply that ID relies on the entire human biochemical processes as one complete, in toto system that if any component were removed would fail.

I understand this. However, “pathways” are an artificial mnemonic for us lowly human biochemists to keep track of what interacts with what in a profoundly complicated system in order to track some given outcome. Some pathways are so interconnected that they would not yield to some definition as “irreducible” except by adding artificial divisions to disconnect them from one another. To the point, in one of the examples you have listed, pieces can be knocked out of the Complement cascade while preserving its _full_ effectiveness.

In my own statement before, Prp fills no known point in any central metabolic pathway, but can be activated by misfolded exogenous Prp to generate an abnormal “pathway” where Prp misfolds other Prp molecules and aggregates into fibers that destroy brain cells and cause prion disease. This pathway has the same sort of functionality as, say, blood clotting. A “pathway” with a single endogenous member by Behe’s definition apparently has the irreducible purpose of causing horrible human death over a prolonged period. Transposons, on the other hand, often encode a single protein that effects cell signaling to cause the cell’s own machinery (machinery used here to mean lots of pathways temporarily moved into parallel to form a new pathway which is actually indistinguishable from their normal operation) to copy out the transposon and copy it back in to the genome elsewhere. If you mutate the transposon, it won’t necessarily site jump, but it will continue to be propagated along with all the rest of the natural DNA and its presence or absense do not effect the ultimate functioning of any of the biochemical pathways that it hijacks, whether it functions or not. Both of these examples relate to my original assertion without involving the sum total of human biochemical processes.

I do see and agree with your original point, Irishman, please don’t think I’m not. I’m simply trying to add my own additional point from inside the profession. I believe that irreducible complexity would not stand up well to peer review because you can think up too many possible exceptions or perversions.