[__ Science __ ] A Hill to Die On

[Barbarian]

Is information theory an argument?
Is germ theory an argument?
Is the theory of evolution an argument?
Is big bang theory an argument?

Of course, the answer is no, none of those are arguments.

Because they describe observable phenomena and make predictions about those phenomena. ID starts with a "governing goal" to establish religious belief, and makes doctrines to comply with that belief.

Hence not science, Religion, yes. Philosophy, yes. Science,no.

 

[Vaccine]

Because they describe observable phenomena and make predictions about those phenomena. ID starts with a "governing goal" to establish religious belief, and makes doctrines to comply with that belief.

Hence not science, Religion, yes. Philosophy, yes. Science,no.

ID theory describes observable phenomena, makes predictions, and has opened up new areas of research that were previously overlooked due to Darwin's influence. What matters is scientists take it seriously. What doesn't matter is people who have never actually read the books or peer reviewed publications by Behe, Dembski, Meyer, Axe, Gauger, and the others. Instead base their opinion of ID theory on a creationist political and cultural action plan.

 

[Vaccine]

As IDers admit in the Wedge Document,the goal of ID is to advance a religious doctrine. Hence, religion, not a theory.

But the broken vitamin C gene in primates is an example of DNA with no phenotypic expression. So Nature had it right. This is entirely inconsistent with the religious doctrine of ID, but makes perfect sense in light of evolutionary theory.

According to you a religious doctrine is making predictions about junk-DNA? Conflation sure causes some weird logic.

 

[Barbarian]

According to you a religious doctrine is making predictions about junk-DNA?

As you know, the Wedge Document shows this, declaring ID's governing goal to to establish a god.

However, since non-coding DNA (what creationists call "junk DNA" was known to have functions long before creationists like Philip Johnson invented ID... You see, if the answer is already in evidence, it's not a prediction. This is religion, not science.

Creationists have long tried to appear sciencey to support their new doctrines. AIG does this quite a lot. Whether it's a cynical attempt to mislead or merely conflation of two entirely different things, is unclear.

Conflation sure causes some weird logic.

 

[Barbarian]

ID theory describes observable phenomena, makes predictions, and has opened up new areas of research that were previously overlooked due to Darwin's influence.

Sounds interesting. Show us a major advance in science that came about only from ID and not actual science.

What matters is scientists take it seriously.

Last time I checked about 0.3% of biologists. Would you like to see how I checked? That matters.

What doesn't matter is people who have never actually read the books or peer reviewed publications by Behe, Dembski, Meyer, Axe, Gauger, and the others. Instead base their opinion of ID theory on a creationist political and cultural action plan.

I've done both. But an ideology whose self-proclaimed governing goal is the advancement of theism, is not a scientific ideology, but a religious one. If ID reverses it's losses and decline over the past decade, it will be because of people like Denton, who emphasizes the "front loading" idea which is not directly inconsistent with science and in fact is (as Denton says) directly opposed to creationism.

 

[Vaccine]

Your intermittent posting may be causing you to forget some context. You stated "Behe was talking about the plausibility of an argument of design, not ID theory itself", which is rather goofy since "ID theory" is an argument of design.

Do you consider the big bang theory an argument for God?
Even if people disagree with Behe, the fact is Behe presented separate cases for the theory and the implication of the theory. Behe says the implications of the theory are debatable, while the theory itself is empirically based. Whether anyone agrees Behe's theory is based on empirically based observations or not doesn't matter. The result is the same: asserting Behe thinks empirically based observations are an argument.
Behe, a tenured professor, understands theories are not an argument. As he has pointed out in his book and numerous articles, the plausibility of a theory does not rest on any religious belief. The plausibility of its implications rests on ones religious beliefs. Judge Jones found one quote confirming his bias and ignored Behe's testimony to the contrary. In order to come up with the nonsense that ID theory is an argument of design.

Which ID creationism completely lacks.


Except for one major inconvenient fact.....we have the documents, statements from ID creationists themselves, and a host of other direct evidence clearly showing how ID creationism was crafted as a legal strategy in response to court rulings against teaching creationism. We have the creationists' own textbook where they defined "creation" and "intelligent design" in precisely the same terms. We have examples of ID creationists referring to themselves as creationists and their arguments as creationist arguments. We have their own document that lays out in direct terms what ID creationism is all about (trying to bring science in line with Christianity and defeat materialism).

I know you'd like all that to go away, but it's not going anywhere.

What makes you think I'd like it to go away? When you actually read the books and publications of Behe, Dembski, Meyers, Axe, and the others. You find out what ID theory is actually about. It was made by scientists for science.
Honestly, it's kinda hard to take any of the conflation between creationism and ID theory seriously. As if anyone would have any success getting creationism taken seriously by the scientific community. ID theory is moving forward because it's science, not religion.

The textbook replacing creator with designer, or creationism with intelligent design happened in 1986. While I agree that's some underhanded, sneaky way to get creationism taught in the schools. It's nothing compared to Piltdown man, Haeckelsakels drawings, and Archaeopteryx.
ID theory was crafted by actual scientists several years later in 1993. So what happened in 1986 isn't an attempt get something taught in the schools that didn't exist. Creationists don't have a copyright claim to the terms either. ID theorists took their queues from Paley and others:
At 6, Chris Doyle came very close with “intelligent, designing,” 1802, from William Paley’s Natural Theology, Chapter 24.

At 33, Vincent Torley notes that English chemist Joseph Priestley used the phrase “intelligent designing cause” in 1794.

At 44, BartM found what looked like a source from1750, in The Natural Philosophy of Albrecht von Haller, p. 53, but it turned out to be the work of an English translator, circa 1980. Good sleuthing! But not the suspect.

At 38, kairosfocus notes that Newton’s translator used the phrase “intelligent Agent ”in 1729.

Also, at 58, Ted Davis notes an instance of “intelligent design” from 1877.

When did the term “intelligent design” originate? | Uncommon Descent

Um....what? That quote wasn't the start of anything, nor was it even a crucial component of the ruling.

I have to ask....have you ever read the Kitzmiller ruling?

I've read it many times. The Judge indeed said it was a crucial part of his ruling:
"As no evidence in the record indicates that any other scientific proposition’s validity rests on belief in God, nor is the Court aware of any such scientific propositions, Professor Behe’s assertion constitutes substantial
evidence that in his view, as is commensurate with other prominent ID leaders, ID
is a religious and not a scientific proposition."
As mentioned earlier, Judge Jones conflates the theory with the implication of the theory. Judge Jones started it and people to this day continue to do it. But history has a way of ferreting out the truth. Black people aren't property, corporations aren't people, and ID theory isn't a religious proposition.

Well, you're welcome to that opinion if you like. But it doesn't change the fact that a federal court has ruled otherwise and every scientific organization that's weighed in on the matter all agreed that it's not science and is a form of creationism.

I suppose you can keep repeating "But it's not" all you like, but really....who cares? Like I keep saying, it's dead. No one is trying to get it taught in schools and no one is utilizing it in any scientific sense at all.

Honestly, we may as well be arguing about phrenology.

Got a citation for "every scientific organization that's weighed in on the matter all agreed that it's not science and is a form of creationism."?
While the court ruled it so. I've yet to see any scientific organization claiming its a "form of creationism."

Citation?

I couldn't find it since it was from 2006. So I have no support of my claim.

I will say this sums up how things started:
"Most of the arguments are gussied up versions of the kind of handwaving, ignorant rationalizations you'd get from some pomaded fundagelical Baptist minister who got all his biology from the Bible, not at all what you'd expect from a tenured professor of biochemistry at a good university—throwing in an occasional technical gloss or mangled anecdote from the literature is only a gloss to fool the rubes." -PZ Meyers

Vs how they finish:
"By a couple of arguments, from the probability of getting two independent changes in the sequence and the observed frequency of evolution of chloroquinone resistance in the population of infected people, he comes up with a number: the odds of acquiring this specific pair of mutations is one in 1020. Fair enough; if you demand a very specific pair of amino acid changes in specific places in a specific protein, I agree, the odds are going to be very long on theoretical considerations alone, and the empirical evidence supports the claim of improbability for that specific combination." -PZ Meyers

https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/06/05/behes-edge-of-evolution-part-i

 

[Vaccine]

Again, that's just lazy thinking. "Courts have been wrong in the past, therefore I can wave away any court ruling I don't like".

There's nothing unreasonable about thinking the courts decide legal matters while scientists decide scientific matters. History bears this out.

 

[Vaccine]

That's an interesting claim. Can you cite any papers published in scientific journals that utilize those terms?

Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004)
"The Cambrian explosion represents a remarkable jump in the specified complexity or “complex specified information” (CSI) of the biological world."

"These analyses portray a complex landscape of long-range gene–element connectivity across ranges of hundreds of kilobases to several megabases, including interactions among unrelated genes (Supplementary Fig. 1, section Y). Furthermore, in the 5C results, 50–60% of long-range interactions occurred in only one of the four cell lines, indicative of a high degree of tissue specificity for gene–element connectivity."

An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome - Nature

This overview of the ENCODE project outlines the data accumulated so far, revealing that 80% of the human genome now has at least one biochemical function assigned to it; the newly identified functional elements should aid the interpretation of results of genome-wide association studies, as many...

www.nature.com

Another interesting claim. Where and when specifically did ID creationists make that prediction?

Dembski in 1998:
"Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function......Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it."

An ID Prediction for CRISPR Gene Editing

In 1998, I published a piece in First Things titled "Science and Design." In it I offered the following prediction about junk DNA: Even when I wrote this in 1998, biologists should have seen the…

billdembski.com

Axe in 2000:
"Contrary to the prevalent view, then, enzyme function places severe constraints on residue identities at positions showing evolutionary variability, and at exterior non-active-site positions, in particular. Homologues sharing less than about two-thirds sequence identity should probably be viewed as distinct designs with their own sets of optimising features." -Douglas Axe

Extreme functional sensitivity to conservative amino acid changes on enzyme exteriors - PubMed

Mutagenesis studies and alignments of homologous sequences have demonstrated that protein function typically is compatible with a variety of amino-acid residues at most exterior non-active-site positions. These observations have led to the current view that functional constraints on sequence are...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Meyer in 2009:
"the design logic of an information-processing system precludes carrying a preponderance of useless code, especially in biological settings where such excess would impose a burdensome energy cost on the cell.” -Signature in the Cell

Home

a must-read book.Dr. Scott Turner, Environmental & Forest Biology, State University of New York Purchase https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qte8NX4R8MY&list=PL7Wwl5TzliiENgVVthjrGOJgd4dkvXBqx The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy themysteryoflifesorigi

signatureinthecell.com

In 2012 ENCODE found function for over 80% of non-coding DNA. Proving ID theorists right and evolutionary biologists wrong.

That makes no sense at all. The abstract you linked to simply points out that there are some genetic sequence types that only exist to replicate themselves while doing nothing for the organism in which they exist. That's simply an observed fact (transposable elements).

As far as predictions about non-functional DNA, I think you've missed the point. You claimed ID creationists "predicted" that what was previously thought to be "junk DNA" would be functional. As I pointed out by citing a paper from the 80's, geneticists already knew that some non-coding sequences (what was labelled "junk DNA") were functional.

So ID creationists can't say they "predicted" something that was already known.

Also I have to wonder....why would functional non-coding sequences be a necessary prediction of ID creationism?

At least we're moving from ID theory makes no predictions to why would they predict that?

The predictions were and are about the majority of function for non-coding DNA. That function was found in a small percent of the genome in 1970's is irrelevant. If the function found in the 1970's was relevant, this would not have been published: “Natural selection operating within genomes will inevitably result in the appearance of DNAs with no phenotypic expression whose only ‘function’ is survival within genomes.” -Nature 1980

But it was published in 1980 and evolutionary biologists have claimed junk-DNA as evidence of Darwinian evolution from the 1970's right up until the 2012. When ENCODE published its findings they showed how wrong Darwinists are and how right ID theorists are.

From 2010:
“noncoding repetitive sequences–‘ junk DNA’–comprise the vast bulk (at least 50%, and probably much more) of the human genome.” -Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259728509_Inside_the_Human_Genome_A_Case_for_Non-Intelligent_Design

 

[Vaccine]

As you know, the Wedge Document shows this, declaring ID's governing goal to to establish a god.

However, since non-coding DNA (what creationists call "junk DNA" was known to have functions long before creationists like Philip Johnson invented ID... You see, if the answer is already in evidence, it's not a prediction. This is religion, not science.

Creationists have long tried to appear sciencey to support their new doctrines. AIG does this quite a lot. Whether it's a cynical attempt to mislead or merely conflation of two entirely different things, is unclear.

Conflation sure causes some weird logic.

This is about as entertaining as watching conservatives trying so desperately to prove Biden is the most corrupt president ever. The idea any scientific theories governing goals is to establish a god is absurd. Laughable even.
Yet, if you conflate ID theory with creationism, all of a sudden it all makes sense. Then it looks like a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government and establish a theocracy. Who wouldn't fight this evil? I sure don't want to live under a theocracy.
Behe isn't a creationist, but don't let that stop you. The Wedge document is all you need to make a critical assessment. The political and cultural strategy utilizing the implications of ID theory to overthrow materialism says it all. But if it turns out aliens created life billions of years ago, ID theory would be completely validated, while the Wedge document would perish. Again, any evidence ID theory is science has to be ignored in order to carry on with this conspiracy theory.

 

[Vaccine]

Sounds interesting. Show us a major advance in science that came about only from ID and not actual science.

Axe in 2000:
"Contrary to the prevalent view, then, enzyme function places severe constraints on residue identities at positions showing evolutionary variability, and at exterior non-active-site positions, in particular. Homologues sharing less than about two-thirds sequence identity should probably be viewed as distinct designs with their own sets of optimising features." -Douglas Axe
See the other post for the rest about Junk-DNA. Darwin's theory discouraged scientists to look for function where ID theory encouraged it.

Last time I checked about 0.3% of biologists. Would you like to see how I checked? That matters.

Let's see your source.

I've done both. But an ideology whose self-proclaimed governing goal is the advancement of theism, is not a scientific ideology, but a religious one. If ID reverses it's losses and decline over the past decade, it will be because of people like Denton, who emphasizes the "front loading" idea which is not directly inconsistent with science and in fact is (as Denton says) directly opposed to creationism.

Considering the mischaracterization of Behe as a creationist, I find that hard to believe. Following it up with a quote from the Wedge document makes it even harder to believe. You know he believes in common ancestry, billions of years, etc?
If you had read his book you would know his primary objection is to random mutations. Not that random mutations don't happen, just that there's a limit to what random mutations create. Not what I'd call "an ideology whose self-proclaimed governing goal is the advancement of theism".

​

 

[Uncle J]

Do you consider the big bang theory an argument for God?
Even if people disagree with Behe, the fact is Behe presented separate cases for the theory and the implication of the theory. Behe says the implications of the theory are debatable, while the theory itself is empirically based. Whether anyone agrees Behe's theory is based on empirically based observations or not doesn't matter. The result is the same: asserting Behe thinks empirically based observations are an argument.
Behe, a tenured professor, understands theories are not an argument. As he has pointed out in his book and numerous articles, the plausibility of a theory does not rest on any religious belief. The plausibility of its implications rests on ones religious beliefs. Judge Jones found one quote confirming his bias and ignored Behe's testimony to the contrary. In order to come up with the nonsense that ID theory is an argument of design.

You're either forgetting, or hoping I would forget, all the evidence explicitly showing that creation by God isn't an "implication" of ID creationism, but is actually the entire point. It's the specific reason why creationists came up with it and what they hoped to accomplish with it.

What makes you think I'd like it to go away? When you actually read the books and publications of Behe, Dembski, Meyers, Axe, and the others. You find out what ID theory is actually about. It was made by scientists for science.

No it wasn't. If it was intended for scientists they would've put all their efforts into doing actual research and publishing articles in scientific journals. Instead, they put their resources into lobbying school boards, speaking at churches, and writing books for the public.

Honestly, it's kinda hard to take any of the conflation between creationism and ID theory seriously. As if anyone would have any success getting creationism taken seriously by the scientific community. ID theory is moving forward because it's science, not religion.

Well again, you're welcome to that opinion. I don't see any indications that ID creationism is "moving forward" and in fact everything I've seen indicates the opposite. No one is trying to get it taught in schools (which was the whole point of it), no one is doing any research into it, the Discovery Institute shut down their "research arm" years ago.....all clear indications that it's as I said, effectively dead.

The textbook replacing creator with designer, or creationism with intelligent design happened in 1986.

The first edition of Of Pandas and People that defined "creation" as "the various forms of life began abruptly through the agency of an intelligent creator with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc. was published in 1989. The second edition where "creation" was replaced with "intelligent design" (with the same definition) was published in 1993.

ID theory was crafted by actual scientists several years later in 1993.

Not according to ID creationists.

"But the term “creation” also had a very specific and quite different meaning, namely those who start with a religious premise (that their particular literal interpretation of the Bible is true) and then read nature in light of their interpretation of Scripture. It was this approach that was held by the Supreme Court to be problematic from an Establishment Clause perspective.​

​

As noted above, the Court’s decision, in essence, highlighted a particular meaning of “creation science.” Once that term had been enshrined in by the Court, it’s understandable and perfectly appropriate that people trying to use the term in a very different way (reasoning from scientific evidence to design) would be all the more interested in finding a term that more precisely fit what they were actually doing. Without changing the substance of the argument (from evidence in nature to intelligence), the authors searched for a more generic term, one more apt and less likely to be misunderstood.​

​

As the academic editor for FTE, Thaxton was then serving as the editor for Pandas, and as it neared completion, Thaxton continued to cast around for a term to describe a science open to evidence for intelligent causation and free of religious assumptions, a term without the religious baggage associated with “creation” but one less ponderous than “intelligent cause,” and, at the same time, more general, a term that could refer to the design theory in toto.​

​

He found it in a phrase he picked up from a NASA scientist—intelligent desgin. “That’s just what I need,” Thaxton recalls thinking. “It’s a good engineering term…. After I first saw it, it seemed to jibe. When I would go to meetings, I noticed it was a phrase that would come up from time to time. And I went back through my old copies of Science magazine and found the term used occasionally.” Soon the term “intelligent design” was incorporated into the language of the book.​

So once again we see how "intelligent design" arose as a response to court rulings against teaching creationism.

Creationists don't have a copyright claim to the terms either. ID theorists took their queues from Paley and others:

Yup, it's well known that ID creationists resurrected old creationist arguments.

I've read it many times. The Judge indeed said it was a crucial part of his ruling:
"As no evidence in the record indicates that any other scientific proposition’s validity rests on belief in God, nor is the Court aware of any such scientific propositions, Professor Behe’s assertion constitutes substantial
evidence that in his view, as is commensurate with other prominent ID leaders, ID
is a religious and not a scientific proposition."
As mentioned earlier, Judge Jones conflates the theory with the implication of the theory. Judge Jones started it and people to this day continue to do it.

Read more closely. Judge Jones said it was substantial evidence that Behe believed ID creationism is a religious proposition.

Got a citation for "every scientific organization that's weighed in on the matter all agreed that it's not science and is a form of creationism."?
While the court ruled it so. I've yet to see any scientific organization claiming its a "form of creationism."

I already provided it for you, but I'll go ahead and do it again.

List of Scientific Bodies Explicitly Rejecting Intelligent Design

I couldn't find it since it was from 2006. So I have no support of my claim.

Noted.

There's nothing unreasonable about thinking the courts decide legal matters while scientists decide scientific matters. History bears this out.

Correct. And the question, is intelligent design a form of creationism, is a legal question (directly applies to the legality of teaching it in public schools) and the courts have ruled that it is. The question, is intelligent design a legitimate scientific proposition, is a scientific question and the scientific community have unequivocally said that it isn't.

 

[Barbarian]

See the other post for the rest about Junk-DNA. Darwin's theory discouraged scientists to look for function where ID theory encouraged it.

Seems wrong, seeing as Darwinians were locating functions for non-coding DNA long before creationists invented ID. On the other hand, Darwinian theory is precisely why scientists discovered that non-coding DNA is often the source of new genes via mutation and natural selection. Ironically, you have it precisely backwards.

Last time I checked about 0.3% of biologists. Would you like to see how I checked? That matters.

"Project Steve" is a study, listing people named "Steve"or some variant, who have doctorates in biology or a related field and accept Darwinian theory.

List of Steves | National Center for Science Education

Meet the Steves As of June 12, 2023, 1490 Steves have signed the statement. Will you be the next Steve?

ncse.ngo

Scientists who Doubt Darwin is a Discovery Institute sponsored group of scientists who do not accept Darwinian theory.

Dissent from Darwin – There is a scientific dissent from Darwinism and it deserves to be heard.

dissentfromdarwin.org

There are about 1490 Steves who have signed on to Project Steve. All you have to do is count the Steves with PhDs in biology or a related field in the DI list. And compare. Last time I counted there were about 0.3% as many Steves on the DI list. Enjoy.

Considering the mischaracterization of Behe as a creationist, I find that hard to believe.

Behe has broken with IDers like Jonathan Wells (Moonie), Phillip Johnson (fundamentalist Christian) and so on. As I pointed out, so has Micheal Denton. They now accept the fact of evolution. Ironically, ID is evolving. Part of the difficulties they are now experiencing is due to the divisions in the movement. One group is moving toward science, and one is moving farther toward religious belief. This is called "disruptive selection"; some social environments favor the traditional fundamentalist YE creationist form and others favor a less-supernatural inclined philosophy.

Discovery Institute Fellow Jonathan Wells admits that he has a religious agenda to "destroy evolution" on orders from the Rev. Myung Son Moon. Michael Denton thinks the universe was front loaded to make life as we see it. And the fractures grow.

If you had read his book you would know his primary objection is to random mutations.

Too bad. Luria and Delbruck got their Nobels for demonstrating that useful mutations do not appear in response to need.

In 1943, it had long been known that bacterial cultures rapidly develop resistance to viral infection. Some biologists argued that viruses directly induced resistance mutations, while others believed the mutations arose spontaneously before exposure to the virus. But when Luria and Delbrück first attempted to distinguish between these two hypotheses, they were frustrated by what appeared to be irritatingly inconsistent mutation rates. Then, after watching a colleague win a jackpot ($3 in dimes!) at a slot machine, Luria realized this inconsistency was telling him something: the number of mutant bacterial colonies present at the end of the experiment depended on when the mutations arose. Mutations arising in earlier generations would be present in many descendent cells (a “jackpot”), whereas mutations occurring in later generations would be present in only a few cells.

Luria passed his insight to Delbrück, who worked out the expected statistical distribution of the number of mutant cells per culture. Their data decisively rejected the hypothesis that bacteria became resistant only after being exposed to the virus and strongly supported the prediction that the phage-resistant mutations had a constant probability of occurring in each cell division.

The Luria–Delbrück article had three important impacts beyond its direct conclusion: it showed that elegant statistical analysis could illuminate biological processes that could not be directly observed, it contributed to Luria and Delbrück winning the 1969 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology (shared with Alfred Hershey), and it led, indirectly, to a continuing debate about whether organisms exert physiological control over their mutation rates.

Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück on Random Mutation and Fluctuation Tests

Do mutations arise randomly over time? Or are they induced by unfavorable environments? By addressing these crucial evolutionary questions, Salvador Luria and M

academic.oup.com

Some mutations are more likely than others, but none of them are in response to need. There are a number of mutations that seem to predispose organisms to more frequent mutations, and it's noted that organisms in stable environments tend to have lower mutation rates than organisms in more variable environments. Which makes evolutionary sense.

Reality is completely opposed to Behe's belief in some kind of designer stepping in and tinkering with nature to make it work correctly.

Not what I'd call "an ideology whose self-proclaimed governing goal is the advancement of theism".

Take it up with the IDers. That's their stated goal.

 

[Barbarian]

This is about as entertaining as watching conservatives trying so desperately to prove Biden is the most corrupt president ever.

To make the two comparable, Biden would have had to have his cabinet sign a document declaring that their governing goal was to be the most corrupt administration ever.

Yet, if you conflate ID theory with creationism, all of a sudden it all makes sense. Then it looks like a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government and establish a theocracy.

Texas and Florida are heading that way, Kansas legislature almost mandated supernatural agencies to be taught as part of science classes.

The Wedge document is all you need to make a critical assessment.

It is their self-proclaimed admission of the purpose of ID.

But if it turns out aliens created life billions of years ago, ID theory would be completely validated

One of their founders did say that the god they talk about, "might be a space alien." But none of them actually advocate that. It's their attempt to appear less religiously-motivated. Did you know the Wedge Document was only for internal distribution? Someone accidentally sent it out to a print shop with other documents, and someone in the shop found it and... well, you know.

ID theory would be completely validated, while the Wedge document would perish.

This is why any evidence the "designer" isn't God, has to be ignored in order to carry on with this goal of establishing God in science.

 

[Uncle J]

Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004)
"The Cambrian explosion represents a remarkable jump in the specified complexity or “complex specified information” (CSI) of the biological world."

Is that the Sternberg paper?

"These analyses portray a complex landscape of long-range gene–element connectivity across ranges of hundreds of kilobases to several megabases, including interactions among unrelated genes (Supplementary Fig. 1, section Y). Furthermore, in the 5C results, 50–60% of long-range interactions occurred in only one of the four cell lines, indicative of a high degree of tissue specificity for gene–element connectivity."

An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome - Nature

This overview of the ENCODE project outlines the data accumulated so far, revealing that 80% of the human genome now has at least one biochemical function assigned to it; the newly identified functional elements should aid the interpretation of results of genome-wide association studies, as many...

www.nature.com

You're going to have to explain how that has anything to do with my request.

Dembski in 1998:
"Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function......Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it."

An ID Prediction for CRISPR Gene Editing

In 1998, I published a piece in First Things titled "Science and Design." In it I offered the following prediction about junk DNA: Even when I wrote this in 1998, biologists should have seen the…

billdembski.com

First, as I already noted, geneticists were well aware decades earlier that some non-coding regions had functions. It's not a "prediction" if it's already known.

Second, that's not even a meaningful statement. What does "as much as possible" mean? And again, why would functional non-coding sequences be a necessary prediction of ID creationism?

Axe in 2000:
"Contrary to the prevalent view, then, enzyme function places severe constraints on residue identities at positions showing evolutionary variability, and at exterior non-active-site positions, in particular. Homologues sharing less than about two-thirds sequence identity should probably be viewed as distinct designs with their own sets of optimising features." -Douglas Axe

Extreme functional sensitivity to conservative amino acid changes on enzyme exteriors - PubMed

Mutagenesis studies and alignments of homologous sequences have demonstrated that protein function typically is compatible with a variety of amino-acid residues at most exterior non-active-site positions. These observations have led to the current view that functional constraints on sequence are...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Again, you're going to have to explain how that relates to the question I asked (ID creationists making predictions).

Meyer in 2009:
"the design logic of an information-processing system precludes carrying a preponderance of useless code, especially in biological settings where such excess would impose a burdensome energy cost on the cell.” -Signature in the Cell

Home

a must-read book.Dr. Scott Turner, Environmental & Forest Biology, State University of New York Purchase https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qte8NX4R8MY&list=PL7Wwl5TzliiENgVVthjrGOJgd4dkvXBqx The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy themysteryoflifesorigi

signatureinthecell.com

Again, it's not a "prediction" when you say something that's already been known for decades.

In 2012 ENCODE found function for over 80% of non-coding DNA. Proving ID theorists right and evolutionary biologists wrong.

First of all.....huh? Even taking ENCODE's findings at face value shows that 20% is non-functional. How does that support ID creationism and go against evolutionary biology? Please explain.

Second, I don't know how much education and experience you have in genetics (I have a fair bit), but are you aware that ENCODE's criterion for "functional" was merely detection of any level of biochemical activity? So for example, a pseudogene that produces only the first few amino acids of a protein but then stops with the AA's getting digested by the cell, would have been counted as "functional", even though it's not functional in any sort of meaningful way.

That's why ENCODE got a lot of criticism from their peers and eventually they confessed that they did that to garner press attention and raise their profile.

"Kellis says that ENCODE isn't backing away from anything. The 80% claim, he says, was misunderstood and misreported. Roughly that proportion of the genome might be biochemically active, he explains, but some of that activity is undoubtedly meaningless, leaving unanswered the question of how much of it is really 'functional'."

At least we're moving from ID theory makes no predictions to why would they predict that?

You're kind of missing the point. I can make up a "theory of bipedal manipulation" and claim that it predicts the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. But when the sun rises in the east do I get to claim my theory has been validated? Of course not! That's why I keep asking you to explain why functional sequences are a necessary prediction of ID creationism.

The predictions were and are about the majority of function for non-coding DNA.

Again, why? What specifically about ID creationism necessarily requires 50% or more of non-coding DNA to be functional? Why would 51% functional be okay for ID creationism but 49% not be?

That function was found in a small percent of the genome in 1970's is irrelevant. If the function found in the 1970's was relevant, this would not have been published: “Natural selection operating within genomes will inevitably result in the appearance of DNAs with no phenotypic expression whose only ‘function’ is survival within genomes.” -Nature 1980

But it was published in 1980 and evolutionary biologists have claimed junk-DNA as evidence of Darwinian evolution from the 1970's right up until the 2012.

Sorry, that makes no sense.

From 2010:
“noncoding repetitive sequences–‘ junk DNA’–comprise the vast bulk (at least 50%, and probably much more) of the human genome.” -Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259728509_Inside_the_Human_Genome_A_Case_for_Non-Intelligent_Design

Again, that makes no sense.

 

[Barbarian]

Sounds interesting. Show us a major advance in science that came about only from ID and not actual science.

"Contrary to the prevalent view, then, enzyme function places severe constraints on residue identities at positions showing evolutionary variability, and at exterior non-active-site positions, in particular. Homologues sharing less than about two-thirds sequence identity should probably be viewed as distinct designs with their own sets of optimising features." -Douglas Axe

From his paper...

"Mutagenesis studies and alignments of homologous sequences have demonstrated that protein function typically is compatible with a variety of amino-acid residues at most exterior non-active-site positions. These observations have led to the current view that functional constraints on sequence are minimal at these positions."

There's a good reason for this. Highly-conserved molecules like cytochrome C vary quite a bit in different taxa:

Some parts of the molecule are extremely conserved. Active sites change little or not at all. But other areas can often vary quite a bit. But since the shape of the molecule matters, some changes, even apart from the non-active areas, matter a lot. But this isn't an argument for design. It clearly evolves by Darwinian processes. But evolution isn't magic. We aren't going to get an extra set of hands, even if it would be useful. No workable intermediate stages, and some of the transitions would be so harmful as to be prohibited by natural selection. This is what Axe found.

Do you have actual examples?

Darwin's theory discouraged scientists to look for function where ID theory encouraged it.

Show us that. Can't think of an example. And as you know, since ID makes no actual predictions, it is a doctrine not a theory. It relies on a religious belief, and it's stated goal is to establish God.

But it was published in 1980 and evolutionary biologists have claimed junk-DNA as evidence of Darwinian evolution

The GULO gene, for example. It is the vitamin C gene in primates. But it's broken. A mutation inactivated it. Didn't matter to primates, who eat fruit and get it from their diets. It had a function, but now it's broken.

The Genetics of Vitamin C Loss in Vertebrates​

Curr Genomics
v.12(5); 2011 Aug

The mutations breaking the gene in each of the three cases are different which is contrary to the assumptions of "design" but consistent with evolutionary theory.

There's nothing unreasonable about thinking the courts decide legal matters while scientists decide scientific matters. History bears this out.

Biologists have overwhelmingly rejected ID in favor of evolutinary theory. Do the Project Steve comparison and see for yourself.

 

[Barbarian]

www

 

[Barbarian]

No one is trying to get it taught in schools (which was the whole point of it), no one is doing any research into it, the Discovery Institute shut down their "research arm" years ago.....all clear indications that it's as I said, effectively dead.

They actually tried to fake a lab, using a stock photo photoshopped with a DI employee:

Intelligent design think tank’s “institute” is a Shutterstock image​

Presumably, we are meant to let the nice scientist’s words and theories wash over us in the glow of the lab she’s sitting in… except the lighting on her person and the lighting in the lab don’t quite add up. The sequence was pretty obviously green screened, and Panda’s Thumb has the stock image of a biology lab from Shutterstock to prove it. Instant credibility! Or not.

Intelligent design think tank's “institute” is a Shutterstock image

A green screen plus a stock image of a lab equals instant credibility.

arstechnica.com

 

[Uncle J]

They actually tried to fake a lab, using a stock photo photoshopped with a DI employee:

Intelligent design think tank’s “institute” is a Shutterstock image​

Presumably, we are meant to let the nice scientist’s words and theories wash over us in the glow of the lab she’s sitting in… except the lighting on her person and the lighting in the lab don’t quite add up. The sequence was pretty obviously green screened, and Panda’s Thumb has the stock image of a biology lab from Shutterstock to prove it. Instant credibility! Or not.

Intelligent design think tank's “institute” is a Shutterstock image

A green screen plus a stock image of a lab equals instant credibility.

arstechnica.com

Eeeyup, that's why I put "research arm" in quotes. Like much of ID creationism, it was a charade.

Interestingly, Douglas Axe did some legitimately good work. The problem was, it was focused on trying to demonstrate limits to evolutionary mechanisms, which only supports ID creationism under the contrived dualism model (evidence against evolution = evidence for creation) that many creationists of all sorts adopted.

I get a chuckle when ID creationists try and pass his work off as "research into ID", because all it usually takes to counter that is to ask them if they've actually read through his papers. Most haven't and are only parroting talking points without bothering to check.

 

[Barbarian]

I get a chuckle when ID creationists try and pass his work off as "research into ID", because all it usually takes to counter that is to ask them if they've actually read through his papers. Most haven't and are only parroting talking points without bothering to check.

I kinda suspected that after reading some of his papers on different sites. Wasn't Axe involved in the Baylor University fiasco with William Dembski in some kind of ID program that the University ultimately shut down until it could be made clear that that Baptist university did not in any way endorse the effort?

The closure of the short-lived Evolutionary Informatics Lab formed by Baylor University engineering professor Robert J. Marks II, which included Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary research professor in philosophy William Dembski as a postdoctoral researcher. The lab was shut down and its website was deleted because Baylor's administration considered that it violated university policy forbidding professors from creating the impression that their personal views represent Baylor as an institution. Baylor however permitted Marks to resume work in the informatics lab on his own time and maintain his website, provided a disclaimer accompany any intelligent design-advancing research makes clear that the work does not represent the university's position.

Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Uncle J]

I kinda suspected that after reading some of his papers on different sites. Wasn't Axe involved in the Baylor University fiasco with William Dembski in some kind of ID program that the University ultimately shut down until it could be made clear that that Baptist university did not in any way endorse the effort?

The closure of the short-lived Evolutionary Informatics Lab formed by Baylor University engineering professor Robert J. Marks II, which included Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary research professor in philosophy William Dembski as a postdoctoral researcher. The lab was shut down and its website was deleted because Baylor's administration considered that it violated university policy forbidding professors from creating the impression that their personal views represent Baylor as an institution. Baylor however permitted Marks to resume work in the informatics lab on his own time and maintain his website, provided a disclaimer accompany any intelligent design-advancing research makes clear that the work does not represent the university's position.

Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'm not sure, and I can't find anything specifically tying Axe to the Baylor fiasco.