Re: [asa] Demarcation was Re: thinking was prosecutors and not that of the judge

Science has found some interesting data
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=avwA.vw8eloU&refer=canada

Not suprisingly, IDists are claiming that junk dna was both a
prediction of ID (it wasn't) and shows how evolution is wrong.

What is exciting however is that

<quote>
 The ENCODE scientists suspected that these areas held important
information and purposes, said Ewan Birney, a senior scientist at the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics
Institute in Hinxton, U.K., who also helped direct the study.

``People involved in genomics knew this stuff was not hanging around
for the hell of it,'' he said. ``The junk is not junk. It is very
active, it does a lot of things.'' </quote>

In other words, conserved DNA meant that there was likely going to be
a function for said DNA but until evidence of such functions were
found it is better to assume 'unknown'. Compare this with ID which
would insist on 'designed', which basically means that we do not know
its function yet...

Note that it were scientists not IDists who contributed to these
exciting new findings.

On 5/7/07, PvM <pvm.pandas@gmail.com> wrote:
> IDers have claimed that ID 'predicted' that Junk DNA is not all junk.
> Of course there are several problems with this a) they claim that Junk
> DNA was a Darwinian prediction when in fact it was an observation
> presented in support of neutral evolution b) evolutionists already had
> discussed potential roles for Junk DNA and finally c) there is no
> logical foundation for ID to have made this 'prediction'.
>
> Remember that ID is based on inferring design based on complexity and
> specification. Since Junk DNA has no specification, how can it lead to
> a prediction. But at a deeper level, ID does not propose ANY
> foundation for it to make positive predictions about anything. That's
> because ID is inherently a negative argument. When creationists argued
> that Junk DNA must have function, their 'prediction' was in response
> to claims by scientists who showed how pseudogenes were better
> explained by evolutionary processes. While ID is unable to state 'our
> designer would not design junk', one could make an argument that God
> would be far more tidy in his 'design' of humans and note waste all
> this space with Junk. But that requires us to assume something about
> the intentions of the designer and as ID points out, it cannot make
> such inferences.
>
> In other words, ID is totally unable to present ANY positive
> prediction beyond 'well science will never be able to explain X,.
> let's called X designed'...
>
> Ryan Nichols has discussed the problems with ID in "Scientific
> content, testability, and the vacuity of Intelligent Design theory"
> The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2003 ,vol. 77 ,no 4
> ,pp. 591 - 611
>
> <quote>
> Before I proceed, however, I note that Dembski makes an important
> concession to his critics. He refuses to make the second assumption
> noted above. When the EF implies that certain systems are
> intelligently designed, Dembski does not think it follows that there
> is some intelligent designer or other. He says that, "even though in
> practice inferring design is the first step in identifying an
> intelligent agent, taken by itself design does not require that such
> an agent be posited. The notion of design that emerges from the design
> inference must not be confused with intelligent agency" (TDI, 227, my
> emphasis).
> </quote>
>
>
>
> On 5/7/07, Dave Wallace <wdwllace@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> > Maybe someone else knows of something testable that ID predicts then it
> > would be interesting to know what it is. Even the "for all" sort or of
> > the "never" will be explicable sort would be somewhat interesting. As
> > best I can tell Behe's assertions about irreducible complexity in the
> > cases he mentions in his book are being cast into more and more doubt,
> > so one more assertion that feature X is irreducibly complex is not very
> > interesting.
>

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Received on Wed Jun 13 23:59:24 2007