----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Petermann" <SteveGP@email.msn.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2000 11:19 PM
> Glenn,
>
> One of your main criticisms of the Intelligent Design movement is that it
> doesn't offer specific experimental means for substantiating its claims.
It
> seems to me, however, that the notion of an outside intelligent agent
> actually precludes any ID affirming experiments. Unlike the regularities
of
> nature which can be measured experimentally, an outside intelligent agent
is
> by its nature not experimentally available. An experiment would have to
be
> designed essentially to catch God in the act.
Exactly! But that is not what the ID group is trying to do. They are trying
to act as if data can be used to support their position. Darwin's Black Box
is a case in point. Behe said at the talk: "So my point is that science has
to follow the data wherever it
leads no matter what the theological implications and let the future take
care of itself." If Behe didn't believe that there was data to support his
position then he couldn't have said that. They are saying that data
supports the concept of a designer but then refuse to give predictions for
the future collection of data which would support their position.
And I want to make it perfectly clear to everyone that I said this very
thing to Steve Meyer and Paul Nelson at the conference. I am not saying
something here that I didn't say to their faces. ID, if it is to be
successful MUST come up with a scenario to explain what happened. They have
NO explanation for anything at all. And Ptashne is correct each of them has
a different view of how God worked in nature. Nelson, a young-earther, can't
have any form of evolution and thus God must have created nearly every group
directly. Behe, the theistic evolutionist believes that God inputs
information miraculously throughout time. Meyer confines his argument to
the origin of life and says little at the conference about the veracity of
evolution. Who is correct and how do they determine the truth? Obviously,
data can't do this and thus, what they have is faith which is fine, but they
can't call that science. Yet they want to be considered theistic scientists.
They can't have it both ways--being a scientist means making hypotheses and
testing them.To quote one of the speakers at the conference:
"All researchers try to be neutral, to consider the alternatives, but the
basic business of science is to build hypotheses." Simon Conway Morris, The
Crucible of Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 53
If you aren't building hypotheses that can be tested, you aren't a
scientist--period!
So it would be reasonable
> that the ID folks couldn't offer specific affirmative suggestions. It
seems
> to me that because of this, the real issue becomes reasonableness. I
don't
> know about Behe's claim that no one has offered viable detailed Darwinian
> explanations for any complex biochemical processes, but if he is right
then
> unless the Darwinians are able to show some successes in explaining those
> processes like blood clotting then we're stuck with a reasonableness
> approach. It ends up like the anthropic principle. Is it more reasonable
> to explain the extraordinarily rare chance for a life producing universe
by
> believing in a designer or infinite universes?
Ptashne's talk was designed to show how such complex mechanisms arise via
evolution.
>
> Also aren't the Darwinians just as stymied by the lack of affirming
> experiments. Clearly some principals can be affirmed with simple cases
like
> bacteria, but is it reasonable to make a leap from simple mutative systems
> to more complex ones? Wouldn't that proposition have to be confirmed?
But
> how would the multitude of inferences be avoided for more complex
processes
> with many variables.
We have seen in the lab single celled animals become colonial animals
(reference on request). And we have observed volvox which seem to model how
sex and death arose:
In Volvox, almost all the cells are somatic, and very few of the cells are
able to produce new individuals. In some species of Volvox, reproductive
cells, as in Pleodorina, are derived from cells that originally look and
function like somatic cells before they enlarge and divide to form new
progeny. However, in other members of the genus, such as V. carteri, there
is a complete division of labor; the reproductive cells that will create the
next generation are set aside during the division of the reproductive cells
that are forming the new individual. The reproductive cells never develop
functional flagella and never contribute to motility or other somatic
functions of the individual; they are entirely specialized for reproduction.
Thus, although the simpler Volvocaceans may be thought of as colonial
organisms (because each cell is capable of independent existence and of
perpetuating the species), in V. carteri we have a truly multicellular
organism with two distinct and independent cell types (somatic and
reproductive), both of which are required for the perpetuation of the
species. Although not all animals set aside the reproductive cells from the
somatic cells (plants hardly ever do), this separation of germ
(reproductive) cells from somatic cells early in development is
characteristic of many animal phyla and will be discussed in more detail in
Chapter 7." ~ Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology (Sunderland: Sinauer
Assoc. Inc., 1991), p. 18
**
"What happens to the somatic cells of the 'parent ' Volvox now that its
young have 'left home'? Having produced offspring and being incapable of
further reproduction, these somatic cells die. Actually, they commit
suicide, synthesizing a set of proteins that cause the death and dissolution
of the cells that make these proteins. Moreover, in this death, the cells
release for the use of others-including their own offspring- the nutrients
that they had stored during life. 'Thus emerges,' notes David Kirk,'one of
the great themes of life on Planet Earth: 'Some die that others may
live.'"~Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology (Sunderland: Sinauer Assoc.
Inc., 1991), p. 20-21
I might draw an analogy between this last sentence and our Lord. One died
so many could live. Death on earth before the Fall was a picture of what the
redemption was all about.
>
> It seems to me that biochemical processes provide an ideal situation for
> research. They are simple enough to minimize variables and complex enough
> to be good test cases. As a design engineer for more than 25 years, I
find
> the ID arguments about irreducible complexity reasonable, but as a person
> who has embraced Darwinian evolution, I await detailed technical responses
> to the ID challenges. There's a lot of high level rhetoric going on
between
> the camps, but I hope that something more detailed and substantial will be
> forthcoming.
Don't forget that some companies are now using genetic algorithms to design
things. Even John Baumgardner agreed with that and he hates evolution. Yet
he knows that such random search algorithms are quite effective. These
algorithms are built just like living systems with genes and all.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Apr 29 2000 - 21:46:14 EDT