Evolution and Intelligent Design

[BobSmith]

Do you know of any feature of the fossil record which Intelligent Design expects to be found in the future?

Not only the fossil record but also in general, as a part of ID theory:
(1) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found.

If we found a planet full of organisms with uncomplex structures and low information content it wouldn't prove they hadn't been intelligently designed. So ID fits no matter what the pattern of the evidence found.

(2) Forms will be found in the fossil record that appear suddenly and without any precursors.

An Intelligent Designer could build rough drafts and derive new designs from old designs, meaning that forms in the fossil record will appear with precursors. Again ID fits no matter what the pattern of the evidence found.

(3) Genes and functional parts will be re-used in different unrelated organisms.

An Intelligent Designer could create novel parts for each organism. If all life on Earth was made of different parts you can bet people would be strongly arguing that as evidence of Intelligent design. Again ID fits no matter what the pattern of the evidence found.

The genetic code will NOT contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless "junk DNA".

Junk DNA could be a consequence of the design process. Because it has no negative effect on the organism there is no point for the Intelligent Designer to bother removing it afterwards. Again ID fits no matter what the pattern of the evidence found.

I can sincerely say that finding an elephant in the cambrian would disprove evolution. Finding a type of parrot (or something) that ran on something other than DNA would also disprove evolution. As far as I can see Intelligent Design is not a scientific position because it has no way of being potentially disproved (I have given it lots of thought yet have never been able to come up with even one concept that if shown would disprove intelligent design). A theory that fits any evidence possible can't ever be shown to be wrong, even if it is wrong. Which means that we can not be certain it is correct.

[August]

They all accept the fossil record is evidence for evolution and that transitionals exist.

I read the context on talkorigins too. Anyone who doubts evolution is shunned in their scientific community, so they will always add a "but".. Why do we not see transitionals in the fossil record then?

What they are arguing is that the transitionary stages are not always smooth and that there are long periods of stasis (in a given species, not in all species at once).

That is not consistent with the Cambrian, when all the phyla appeared quite suddenly. There is no proof for stasis, just Gould's theory. It cannot explain the sudden appearance of phyla, with no precursors. Punctuated equilibrium is a circular argument to attempt to explain the Cambrian. There is nothing but speculation about what would have caused this to happen. There is no basis for the sudden evolution to have happened.

A lack of precursor fossils is not evidence for precursors not existing.

Sorry Bobsmith, I have to chuckle a bit at this one. As I said earlier, believe what you like, but the evidence does not support that belief. What is a lack of precursor fossils proof of then? You are continuously saying that the fossil record proves evolution, when there is a major gap that you admit to.

Lots of animals simply do not fossilise at all, others only very rarely. Becase pre-cambrian fossils do exist but are so scarce and not in hard forms, it seems highly likely that life simply wasn't fossilising well back then.

Why did soft-body animals fossilize during the Cambrian then? There is a reliable record of all phyla during the Cambrian.

The first species in the fossil record will be the first phyla, as all species must belong to some phyla.

Where is the transitional fossils from the first phyla to the other 33 then?

Life during the cambrian was simpler than in any era since. It consisted of small sea-living creatures (no land animals), with basic forms. Cambrian life was far simpler and far less diverse than life is today.

If you are arguing for increased complexity, please define complexity, and show the evolutionary pathways from the fossil record that allows for the increased complexity. Be sure to include common ancestry of the different phyla. Also, since the Cambrian, which lasted ~70 million years, we have to believe that we have been in stasis for close to 550 million years? I'm sorry if I don't buy that logic. During the preceding 2 billion years, all that emerged was single-cell, and then suddenly witin a short time, less than 5% of the overall time of existence of the earth, all of the phyla suddenly evolved from those single cells? Please show how that can be tested, falsified and observed as per scientific process.

If the internal structure had survived I am sure a few phylum appearance dates would be pushed back.

This is speculation, and again, why did these fossilize during the Cambrian, but not before?

I agree

OK, then evolution is false, since:
1. The transitional fossils predicted are not found. Before you argue that the fossil record is too incomplete, let me remind you:
“There are a hundred million fossils, all catalogued and identified, in museums around the world.”—*Porter Kier, quoted in New Scientist, and
that includes more than 250,000 species. You would think that if evolution held true, that somewhere in there a transitional fossil should have been found.
2. This lack of ancestors is confounded by the fact that molecular studies of the DNA differences of various animals predict that the basic lineages of animals, including many of these phyla, split apart long before the Cambrian Period. (Evolutionary explosions and the Phylogenetic fuse, in Tree, vol 13 no. 4 by Alan Cooper and Richard Fortey & Early Animal Evolution: Emerging Views from Comparative Biology and Geology, Science, vol 284, June 25, 1999. By A. Knoll and S. B. Carroll.)
The evidence shows that many phyla appeared suddenly during the Cambrian, which means that according to the rules of population genetics, it was impossible for the diversity to come into existence that quickly.

[August]

If we found a planet full of organisms with uncomplex structures and low information content it wouldn't prove they hadn't been intelligently designed. So ID fits no matter what the pattern of the evidence found.

What planet is that? This is curious speculation on your part, we are dealing with what we can observe. Define complexity. You are drawing a conclusion based on a strawman argument.

An Intelligent Designer could build rough drafts and derive new designs from old designs, meaning that forms in the fossil record will appear with precursors. Again ID fits no matter what the pattern of the evidence found.

But ID does not predict precursors, so it does not fit "no matter what the pattern of the evidence found." I will agree though, that this is not required as a strong proof for ID, while it is essential for evolution. You are also making an assumption about how the designer can work, again this is speculation.

An Intelligent Designer could create novel parts for each organism. If all life on Earth was made of different parts you can bet people would be strongly arguing that as evidence of Intelligent design.

But it isn't the case, again you are concocting a strawman argument here and not dealing with the evidence. ID made the predictions, if they don't fit then ID holds false. Don't try to speculate that ID is true no matter what, deal with the evidence and show that it does not fit the prediction.

Junk DNA could be a consequence of the design process. Because it has no negative effect on the organism there is no point for the Intelligent Designer to bother removing it afterwards.

This getting rather tiresome. Junk DNA has been found to have many functions, and is not just the byproduct from a naturalist process as previously argued. The most likely scenario is that they control the activity of indispensable genes. Again this nothing but speculation on your part, with no attempt to deal with the evidence.

I can sincerely say that finding an elephant in the cambrian would disprove evolution.

I'm not sure it would. However, the question should be whether there is an evolutionary pathway, supported by evidence, that shows how elephants evolved from a single-cell organism. In your definition, apart from the patently absurd, there is nothing that will disprove evolution either. In order to prove evolution, you already agreed that the 3 points above should all hold true, which they don't. Why do you now want evidence that would prove nothing? No-one is arguing that evolution within species does not take place. The original premise of evolution, however, was that it causes new phyla and species to arise from a common ancestor.

As far as I can see Intelligent Design is not a scientific position because it has no way of being potentially disproved

It does predict certain hypothesis, as discussed above. If any of those can be disproven, then ID would not hold true. I would caution that we should stick to real evidence here, not hypotheticals based on non-existent information.

A theory that fits any evidence possible can't ever be shown to be wrong, even if it is wrong. Which means that we can not be certain it is correct.

This describes evolution. Every time new evidence is found, like the appearance of vertebrate chordata in the Cambrian, it is followed by more storytelling and handwaving, not a critical examination of the theory. It fails to account for the complexity of life and morphological novelty.

[AttentionKMartShoppers]

As far as I can see Intelligent Design is not a scientific position because it has no way of being potentially disproved

Um...circular reasoning, leaps of faith, and, now, hypocrisy

Keep up the good work August...and BobSmith, please realize that have a lot of faith-you don't believe by evidence.

[BobSmith]

That is not consistent with the Cambrian, when all the phyla appeared quite suddenly. There is no proof for stasis, just Gould's theory. It cannot explain the sudden appearance of phyla, with no precursors. Punctuated equilibrium is a circular argument to attempt to explain the Cambrian.

PE is not supposed to explain the Cambrian at all. It is an unrelated topic. But there is evidence that PE is correct in some instances: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/horner.html

A lack of precursor fossils is not evidence for precursors not existing.

Sorry Bobsmith, I have to chuckle a bit at this one. As I said earlier, believe what you like, but the evidence does not support that belief. What is a lack of precursor fossils proof of then? You are continuously saying that the fossil record proves evolution, when there is a major gap that you admit to.

It is other parts of the fossil record that strongly support evolution. Obviously the problem part (which the cambrian represents) is not going to be the evidence I was talking of.

Imagine the following engraving was found: AB.....EFGHIJKLMNOPQXYZ. The conclusion would be that each letter follows the last in the alphabet because that is quite a clear pattern. Just because there is a gap between B and E does not prove this conclusion is incorrect. The letters between B and E are missing, but crucially there is room for them. The lack of letters is not proof that they didn't exist. It is plausible that these letters did exist but did not survived the passage of time. This is further backed up if there are slight remains of letters in the gaps. This is also true of the precambrian where scarce fossils remains are found.

Why did soft-body animals fossilize during the Cambrian then? There is a reliable record of all phyla during the Cambrian.

It is not known entirely why precambrian life did not fossilize. There are a lot of possible factors that can hinder fossilization. The strongest evidence that something was hindering fossilisation before the cambrian is the scarcity (rather than a lack) of precambrian fossils. The very few fossils that do exist show that life similar to cambrian life did exist back then. But then why are so few found? The poor quality of some precambrian fossils suggests that something was hindering fossilisation.

Not all phyla are recorded in the Cambrian. For example none of the 12 plant phyla appear until long after the cambrian explosion.

Where is the transitional fossils from the first phyla to the other 33 then?

Only about 10-15 of the 33 phylum appeared in the Cambrian. The rest appear at later dates.

The difference between the phyla in the cambrian is slight. For example roundworms, flatworms and segmented worms are all seperate phyla that existed in the cambrian - but they are all worms. The difference in apparance between them is far less than between a T-rex and a mouse (which are in the same phylum).

If you are arguing for increased complexity, please define complexity, and show the evolutionary pathways from the fossil record that allows for the increased complexity.

Number of different types of cell for example, but it can just be based on almost anything. Life on Earth today is far more complex and diverse than life in the cambrian by any standards of measurement. Mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, flowering plants and trees along with all their various subgroups (giraffes, bees, tulips, oak trees) did not exist during the cambrian. Their addition adds diversity and complexity to life on Earth.

Cambrian life was simple. Vertibrates existed in the cambrian, but in simpler forms than vertibrates today http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... a0_F4.html

we have to believe that we have been in stasis for close to 550 million years? I'm sorry if I don't buy that logic. During the preceding 2 billion years, all that emerged was single-cell, and then suddenly witin a short time, less than 5% of the overall time of existence of the earth, all of the phyla suddenly evolved from those single cells? Please show how that can be tested, falsified and observed as per scientific process.

Multicellular life appears 400 million years before the cambrian in the form of algae colonies. Worm burrows are also found before the cambrian, and of course the scarce and poor quality pre-cambrian fossils do at least show life existed then which was similar to cambrian life. http://www.trilobites.info/origins.htm

This is speculation, and again, why did these fossilize during the Cambrian, but not before?

That is the mystery.

OK, then evolution is false, since:
1. The transitional fossils predicted are not found. Before you argue that the fossil record is too incomplete, let me remind you:
“There are a hundred million fossils, all catalogued and identified, in museums around the world.”—*Porter Kier, quoted in New Scientist, and
that includes more than 250,000 species. You would think that if evolution held true, that somewhere in there a transitional fossil should have been found.

Who is Porter Kier, and what if he is wrong? If I say that the theory of relativity is wrong, will it be disproved if someone quotes me?

2. This lack of ancestors is confounded by the fact that molecular studies of the DNA differences of various animals predict that the basic lineages of animals, including many of these phyla, split apart long before the Cambrian Period. (Evolutionary explosions and the Phylogenetic fuse, in Tree, vol 13 no. 4 by Alan Cooper and Richard Fortey & Early Animal Evolution: Emerging Views from Comparative Biology and Geology, Science, vol 284, June 25, 1999. By A. Knoll and S. B. Carroll.)
The evidence shows that many phyla appeared suddenly during the Cambrian, which means that according to the rules of population genetics, it was impossible for the diversity to come into existence that quickly.

I don't understand how this follows

[BobSmith]

As far as I can see Intelligent Design is not a scientific position because it has no way of being potentially disproved

Um...circular reasoning, leaps of faith, and, now, hypocrisy

In what way is that hypocritical? It would only be hypocritical if Evolution had no way of being potentially falsified, and I have already given two potential falsifications for evolution.

And where was the circular reasoning?

[BobSmith]

If we found a planet full of organisms with uncomplex structures and low information content it wouldn't prove they hadn't been intelligently designed. So ID fits no matter what the pattern of the evidence found.

What planet is that? This is curious speculation on your part, we are dealing with what we can observe. Define complexity. You are drawing a conclusion based on a strawman argument.

You claimed that ID *expects* "(1) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found".

My argument is that it doesn't expect this, because ID is just as compatible with the opposite:

A machine without "high information" which isn't "irreducibly complex" is still explainable as being the product of an intelligent designer. Therefore it isn't true that ID *expects* what you say.

But ID does not predict precursors

No it doesn't, but importantly ID doesn't expect an absense of precursors. Microsoft Windows is Intelligently Designed, but Windows 2000 has the precursors Windows 95 and Windows 98. So Intelligent Designers produce precursors when they design. So Intelligent Design theory cannot expect the fossil record to have no precursors, unless they are assuming the methods of design.

An Intelligent Designer could create novel parts for each organism. If all life on Earth was made of different parts you can bet people would be strongly arguing that as evidence of Intelligent design.

But it isn't the case, again you are concocting a strawman argument here and not dealing with the evidence. ID made the predictions, if they don't fit then ID holds false.

What discovery about parts would disprove ID then? I can't think of one example. A bird with wings made out of leather?

Junk DNA could be a consequence of the design process. Because it has no negative effect on the organism there is no point for the Intelligent Designer to bother removing it afterwards.

This getting rather tiresome. Junk DNA has been found to have many functions, and is not just the byproduct from a naturalist process as previously argued. The most likely scenario is that they control the activity of indispensable genes. Again this nothing but speculation on your part, with no attempt to deal with the evidence.

Also Microsofts Intelligently Designed operating system has lots of junk-code in it (code that never gets run and therefore has no effect). Therefore shouldn't ID expect some Junk DNA? Or at least not assume there can't be any?

Also while some junk DNA has been found to have functions, but there is a lot of DNA that has no function. DNA that can be removed and it has no ill effect on the organism. The human vitimin C gene for example is broken and does nothing.

I can sincerely say that finding an elephant in the cambrian would disprove evolution.

I'm not sure it would.

Definitely without question. Because that would mean that not only did elephants evolve without any trace of mammal precursors, but they wandered the earth without any other remotely similar animals existing, they existed without other land animals or plants around, died out, and then re-evolved hundreds of millions of years later in the exact same form. There could be no plausible explaination to hold out on.

In your definition, apart from the patently absurd, there is nothing that will disprove evolution either.

An elephant in the cambrian is only absurd relative to the evolutionary model. If evolution is false there is no reason why we shouldn't find elephants and tigers and all sorts of animals in the cambrian. ID doesn't give a reason why we don't find elephants in the cambrian. Only evolution expects elephants to be confined within the last 100 million years or so.

In order to prove evolution, you already agreed that the 3 points above should all hold true, which they don't.

You must have expected I would disagree

[BobSmith]

Anyway it has been fun discussing this all with you, but if you don't mind these will be my last posts as I am spending way too long online nowadays and I am trying to stop. I think ultimately you won the debate here (most people think so anyway)...that is unless you fluff up your next reply

I will definitely read your reply, but unless you really ask for an answer to an argument I will not respond if you don't mind.

I know I might have sounded a bit arrogant or annoying in some of my posts during this discussion, but it wasn't intended. Thanks again for this discussion.

[August]

BobSmith, thanks for the civil debate, I enjoyed it. I will post a final response when I have more time.

Are you an atheist?

[AttentionKMartShoppers]

As far as I can see Intelligent Design is not a scientific position because it has no way of being potentially disproved

Um...circular reasoning, leaps of faith, and, now, hypocrisy

In what way is that hypocritical? It would only be hypocritical if Evolution had no way of being potentially falsified, and I have already given two potential falsifications for evolution.

And where was the circular reasoning?

I feel like I'm holding a small conversation as a circus is going on...I'm taking potshots as August runs into the enemy formation.

Circular reasoning-the punctuated equilibrium (you didn't use it, you just stated somethign that does).
Hypocrisy-You can't technically prove evolution false. It's already been shown to be impossible on every level...but then you're left with that little word..."maybe." That, and nobody was obviously around before humans came into being, so matter if that was after 5 days of creation or billions of years, we haven't a clue what really happenned before us...so it's not falsifiable, because even though statistically you can't win in Vegas...some people do (though odds of life or much less than winning at Vegas).

[Darwin_Rocks]

To say that complex beings is proof of God is a stupid idea because you can never test it and the idea of what is complex is relative.

Just because things seem complex to us does not mean they really are that complex. Just because the nature of human life seems complex does not mean that it is. It is only complex from our perspective because we are living it.

The same way that an ants life probably doesn't seem monotonous for an ant because it is all that they know.

Also Intelligent Design is NOT science because it cannot be tested. Saying that 'oh it appears to be complex therefore something intelligent must have designed it.' is a cop out.

Evolution tells us that evolution is indeed possible and just because macro-evolution ahsn't been proven does not mean that it doesn't happen. It is a more valid hypothesis then suggesting that a God created the world and it's much more testable.

[August]

To say that complex beings is proof of God is a stupid idea because you can never test it and the idea of what is complex is relative.

So prove it. Show non-fallaciously how complex life can arise from non-life, and via the mechanisms of evolution become what they are today. The idea of complexity is not relative.

Just because things seem complex to us does not mean they really are that complex.

So do you not believe in science, which is the observation and description of the universe around us? Why do we need science if everything is so simple?

Just because the nature of human life seems complex does not mean that it is. It is only complex from our perspective because we are living it.

Who mentioned the "nature of human life"? This is a biological discussion.

Also Intelligent Design is NOT science because it cannot be tested.

OK, please provide the tests for punctuated equilibrium. Read the whole thread, ID can be tested, but the so-called scientific establishment does not want to know about it.

Saying that 'oh it appears to be complex therefore something intelligent must have designed it.' is a cop out.

OK, prove where the complexity comes from via evolutionist mechanisms. And how is it a cop-out? If we say that the Statue of Liberty was designed, no-one thinks about it twice.

Evolution tells us that evolution is indeed possible

This is the problem, massive cricular reasoning, abundant in evolutionary circles.

and just because macro-evolution ahsn't been proven does not mean that it doesn't happen.

What happened to the tests and proving it? Here it has not been proven but we must believe that it happens? Have your inexplicable faith in an unproven, untested mechanism if you want, just don't expect me to believe it.

It is a more valid hypothesis then suggesting that a God created the world and it's much more testable.

Why is it a more valid hypothesis? Prove it.

Define testability in this context. Please show the tests for evolution that has been proven true. Include the experimental setup, explain the mechnisms and conditions for the tests, what the controls are, what predictions are made and which are met, and the conclusions arrived at.

[Kurieuo]

Also Intelligent Design is NOT science because it cannot be tested. Saying that 'oh it appears to be complex therefore something intelligent must have designed it.' is a cop out.

By the same means, you've just ruled out Macroevolution as "NOT science" since it also can't be tested.

Yet, you've defeated a strawman in your previous post by focusing in on "complexity" alone. To give an analogy, if you were to drop a box of Scrabble tiles onto the floor the pattern they formed would certainly be complex. However, it isn't complexity alone that IDists believe imply intelligence. Rather it is "specified" complexity. For example, if you were to walk into a room and see Scrabble pieces neatly forming a sentence, then would you not think it most plausible to consider that someone carefully ordered those pieces?

Kurieuo.

[AttentionKMartShoppers]

August stole almost everything I could have fired back with, oh no, what shall I do?

Evolution tells us that evolution is indeed possible and just because macro-evolution ahsn't been proven does not mean that it doesn't happen. It is a more valid hypothesis then suggesting that a God created the world and it's much more testable.

I enjoy that one. Evolution proves itself. A ball picks up itself and throws itself. You've been awarded the dunce of the moment award, you should feel honored. Evolution says that evolution is possible....so says you. The universe cannot spawn something greater than itself. Life cannot come from non-life, it comes from life. Personanlity doesn't come from non personality, it comes from a personal God. Morals don't come from non-morals, they come from God. Wahoo, I said my spiel.

[Darwin_Rocks]

Yeah sorry about that. It was poorly worded because I was tired.

Darwins Theory of Evolution tells us that Evolution is possible.

Evolution can be tested and it has been. Bacteria has evolved. Scientists have observed and continue to do so. to say that Microscopic Evolution and Macro Evolution is any different is a stupid idea.

You guys seem to nail the Evolution scientists with "Evolution hasn't been proven" but you seem to be ignoring the fact that your own theory hasn't been proven either.

In a world of uncertainty the simplest explanation is usually always the right one.