http://www.exploreuniverse.com

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

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.

> As a biochemist, I’ll offer another reason why this is wrong. The statement that the whole biochemical system does not function without any one component is patently false.

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. Behe’s claims relate to particular biochemical pathways within the overall structure. Example: blood clotting, formation of flagella and cilia, the “complement system” of the vertebrate immune system, etc. Each pathway or structure is considered independently.

Its a pretty exhaustive list of evidence, in case David is still lurking…

“Some definitions of religion (among others):

…[deletia]…

Oxford: a pursuit or interest followed with devotion. ”

Incorrect. I have, in front of me right now, the Oxford Dictionary of English, second edition, published in 2003, ISBN 0-19-8613474

Page 1487

religion noun [mass noun] the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods: ideas about the relationship between science and religion

further down, as a [count noun] in the second meaning with that sense, it has what you have quoted, but gives an example of that use:

consumerism is the new religion

Thus, it’s quite reasonable and very fair to say that the meaning you quoted does not apply to science, and you have selectively trimmed the dictionary entry to suit your own needs.

1) The designer would not create species that kill one another on a large scale for reasons other than food. That is, of course, unless he was an evil alien from the original series of Star Trek.

2) A designer will prevent extinctions of species, as all species are His/Her/Its design.

3) Any designer would either create every intelligent creature with an innate knowledge of it (e.g. name, facial features, position on homosexuality and abortion), or alternatively would allow no individual knowledge of the designer. (Why tell some people about yourself and not others?)

4) A designer that created the squid’s eye without a blindspot would do the same thing for every other species, including humans. Why create a fully functioning eye and then not use such a great idea again?

5) Assuming the designer was benevolent (find me one IDer who thinks otherwise), there will be no such things as parasites and infectious diseases. If anyone responds that they are necessary to cull species, surely an intelligent designer would make a way for members of a species to die quickly and painlessly whenever a species population becomes too high.

Are there any experimentalists out there who could test these predictions? I’m sure plenty of ID advocates would give you funding to complete your research.

As a biochemist, I’ll offer another reason why this is wrong. The statement that the whole biochemical system does not function without any one component is patently false. First, one of the major tools used by modern molecular biologists is gene knockout; which is to say that the scientist deletes a gene and looks to see if it affects the growth of the organism. It is a fact that some genes can be knocked out without any deleterious effect; Prp, the protein implicated in prion disease, can be knocked out without either killing or causing any obvious negative health effect. Second, the accepted map of central metabolism is a huge spiderweb of chemical pathways -if you’ve ever taken a class about it, you’ll get shudders remembering it. Some of these pathways are used to synthesize extraordinarily important compounds, like amino acids -which are assembled into proteins-. It is a fact that many higher organisms lack certain pathways for synthesis of these kinds of chemicals de novo (from scrap). You need to acquire these building blocks through your diet because you can’t make them yourself. As a result, you have to rely on some other organism to make them for you. I am to understand that the necessary gene groups still exist as genome relics in some cases, but are inactive due to single point mutations that make them unreadable. These are both examples of ways that pieces of biochemistry can be removed without the whole system collapsing.

The problem I have with the whole argument of “knock something out and everything falls apart, therefore Irreducibly Complex” is that life never seems to work on those absolutes. Living systems have an enormous number of back-up, shunt and plain-out inefficiently quirky features; transposons, for instance. This kind of gene often serves no other purpose but to copy itself out of one spot in the genome and copy itself back into another. That’s all it does, and yet the human genome contains lots of them. It’s the biochemical equivalent of a kid making photocopies of his butt on the office copying machine… it serves no purpose, but it happens. Are they essential to our life-form? No, not a bit. And yet our DNA replication machinery dutifully preserves them.

Given, there are critical biochemical components that you can’t knock out, but you can’t say all or nothing. You can’t knock out the whole ribosome, but you can knock out pieces of it. At some point, in order to preserve the Irreducible Complexity argument, you have to have a set definition of “this is life, plus nothing, minus nothing,” and you don’t even get that between individual organisms of the same species. There are bacteria that randomly pick up pieces of DNA from their environment and use them… which is how antibiotic resistance can get passed from one “species” of bacteria to another. On a rigid definition of species, that’s like me sprouting a third arm and then passing that characteristic over to a goat. There is always some form of “Yeah, but…”

Well, I guess my whole point here is that biochemistry is deliberately imperfect and changable.

But, I defy you to find a beehive that just ‘happened.’ So, since the IDers think that the Creator is intelligent, what is the test they used to determine this?

I realize this is academic, since ID is not science, but faith; however, it is still amusing to poke at them. In my opinion, of course.

IDers would have us think the designer is not important (at least at this point). In one sense, they are correct – first establish design, then worry about the designer. But the problem is that design requires a designer, and there’s only one designer out there that fits the bill. True, if we’re just looking at life on Earth, we can argue that some previous ET society conjured up Earth life as a research project or something, but that just begs the question of their origin. And Earth life is really only the starting point for the ID goal to address the cosmological questions, such as the anthropic principle. Given questions over universal constants and the formation of the laws of the universe, there’s really only one designer that fits the bill – a designer outside of the universe, present before the formation of the universe in order to establish those universal laws and constants. Gee, who could fit the bill?

What about Irreducible Complexity (IC)? IC is Behe’s pet project, the assertion that some elements of biology are too complex to have originated without help, some steps in the development chain too large to have been jumped by the natural processes we know about (mutation and natural selection). One can ignore the philosophical motivations behind the questions and treat IC scientifically, evaluate it on scientific terms. When doing so, it becomes evident that Behe has some serious flaws.

The biggest error for IC is it suffers from a fundamental flaw of assuming that all components necessary for every step in the evolutionary path are currently around in (or at least recognizable as) their unaltered form. Behe is a biochemist, so it makes sense that he discusses biochemical pathways and the development of things like blood clotting, bacterial flagella and cilia, and protein transport in a cell. IC states that these complex biochemical pathways have many components, without any one the whole system would be utterly non-functional. Thus they couldn’t have evolved piecemeal, because each component is worthless without the others. That argument is just wrong.

It is true the current biochemical pathways are complex, and maybe it’s true that all the current components are required for it to function at all, but what is missing is the possibility that the current process did not develope in a linear manner. Like a scaffolding used to construct a building that is removed without a trace once the building is complete, these currently complex pathways could have been formed by other, simpler components that have now disappeared. That simpler pathway may not have functioned as well, but well-enough to bridge the gaps. The current complexity developed originally as unnecessary redundancies that enhanced the process without being required, and then later became necessary as the original mode disappeared.

Here is a review where biochemist David Ussery addresses Behe’s claims head-on. He also points at numerous articles in PubMed that study the origins of biochemical pathways that Behe claims cannot be explained. http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/Behe.html

Another review of Behe’s book, discussing this point. http://bostonreview.net/BR21.6/orr.html

TalkOrigins faq on Behe and IC
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html

More links about IC and Behe
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Catalano/box/behe.shtml

Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap to demonstrate IC. He states that a mousetrap has several parts that are necessary, without any one the whole item fails to function. Well, someone took the mousetrap and demonstrated that it can be broken down into an evolutionary path that starts from one component and evolves into the modern snap-mousetrap that is “irreducibly complex”. This simple demonstration puts Behe’s own analogy to the test, and demonstrates exactly the process of development discussed above, where components that begin as slight improvements and serve one function then change to serve another function, and then disappear as new components replace them more effectively.
http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html

In short, if IC is evaluated on scientific merits, it fails. Therefore, IC is NOT a justification for ID.

(Wikipedia) Intelligent design (ID) is the assertion that empirical evidence supports the conclusion that the initial life on earth, and perhaps some of its present details, was deliberately designed by one or more intelligent agents; additionally, or alternately, it may include the idea that different empirical evidence supports a similar conclusion regarding the universe itself.

My personal definition is: ID is the belief that a speculative hypothesis can be elevated to the status of tested scientific theory through the application of political pressure and the exploitation of ignarance.

Intelligent Design (ID; n):

1) A wholly incorrect idea based on preconceived religious beliefs that evolution must be wrong, despite the vast amount of evidence that evolution is one of the most powerful scientific ideas in the history of mankind. The people behind the ID movement therefore desperately cling to any idea, no matter how obviously wrong, and no matter how much it’s been shown to be wrong, and trumpet it mercilessly and repeatedly.

2) A movement whose sole purpose is to “wedge” specific and monolithic religious beliefs into the classroom, despite the fact that it’s grossly and completely wrong.

3) An offshoot idea from a religious sect that believes in literal Biblical interpretation.

4) A movement many of whose most vocal proponents are known to use deceptive and misleading tactics, stopping just shy of fraud. Usually.

5) Warmed-over creationism.

Oh, nuts! I blew it there in #5. I guess I didn’t play by the rules.

Of course, neither do they. But this isn’t a serious debate, and it’s okay for me to joke here. But when it comes to the real thing, this is a very serious a matter of truth (the real world) versus falsehood (ID). And I won’t stand for it.

Just give a definition, if possible without reference to Creationism.

Yep. I was on the fence about this whole I.D. vs. Evolution thing..damn…lets see, warmed over creationism with no scientific basis, or well established scientific theory with lots of well established facts…

oh wait, you evolution guys GOOGLE BOMB??? looks like I.D. FOR ME!!! screw the dinosaurs!!

BTW, I think this is the most well-done and informative website out there!

Well, as a scientist, I certainly consider it possible that some intelligent entity created life in some way that perfectly simulates the outcome of evolution. For that matter, I consider it possible that the entire universe, including our memories, was created yesterday in such a way that it appears to be billions of years old. But since neither of these options offers any kind of observational or experimental tests, they are not distinguishable from evolution–they merely offer another layer of complexity that adds nothing to the predictive power of the theory of evolution. The notion may be philosophically interesting, but it is scientifically worthless.

One can certainly imagine variants of the ID theory that would be testable–i.e. “Some entity created life in a way that produces results that are almost, but not quite, identical to what you would expect from evolution.” If the people pushing ID were really scientists, we’d see a lot of activity in this area. Scientists want theories that can be tested and potentially disproved. But with a very few exceptions, the people pushing ID are religious zealots rather than scientists, so they don’t dare to risk putting ID to test. So instead of trying to come up with ways to test their own theory, they snipe (generally rather clumsily and dishonestly) at evolution.