Preston Garrison wrote:
> . . . It would pretty hard to argue that all these thousands of defective insertion sequences in our genome have any design as to where they are, or that all have functions. However, a few of them do seem to have taken on a function. One class of elements are the endogenous retroviruses. Glenn Morton posted some material recently on the fact that some of these are present at exactly the same position in higher primates and humans, which is a very strong argument for common descent. Retroviruses contain a gene called 'env' which codes for the envelope protein that mediates fusion of the virus with the cell membrane to allow entry. The env protein of an endogenous retrovirus was recently found to be expressed in the human placenta and apparently contributes to the mass cell fusion that occurs in cells at the interface of the placenta and the uterus.
>
> This kind of thing contributes to the belief by molecular biologists that usually mutations are neutral (like the insertion of most of the endogenous transposable elements) or detrimental (like the disease causing transposon insertions), but occassionally "random" changes result in something beneficial (like the env protein in the placenta.) I don't think this kind of thing rules out the possibility of invoking design, but there is a large component of apparent randomness in biology, and it has to taken seriously. On the other hand, as we know from human examples,design doesn't have to be perfect design to be recognized as such, and this should be remembered by those who feel a need to find a function for everything.
It is not clear to me that any of this challenges the ID thesis. ID proponents generally do not claim that no mutations are beneficial. I think many of them would claim that chance mutations [whether governed by providence or not] are not capable of generating specified complex information (SCI) or irreducibly complex (IC) systems, but this example does not challenge that claim.
> Somewhat along this line, I would be interested to hear what the ID camp has to say about the entities that appear to be both "irreducibly complex" (by their calculations) and examples of natural evil (like the AIDS virus or the pathogenicity genes of bacteria.) The AIDS virus appears to be very cleverly designed to cause devastating disease and to be resistant to any definitive treatment or vaccine. Virologists laugh at the conspiracy theory that it was constructed in a military lab. Even after billions of dollars of research on it, no one knows anywhere near enough to design something like that from scratch. So, did it come about by randomly picking up cellular genes, or does the Devil get to design things, too?
>
> Just some bait to stir up a feeding frenzy,
>
> Preston G.
I don't know much about the HIV virus, so I cannot say whether it shows signs of intelligent design. The ID thesis has no problem with natural evil, because the ID thesis makes no claims about the moral character of the designer(s). The problem of natural evil falls upon those who identify the designer as a good, omniscient, omnipotent God who continually sustains and governs His creation, i.e. the problem falls upon theists. If the HIV virus contains SCI or IC systems, then those theists who maintain that these cannot arise by [providence-governed] chance alone might claim either that the HIV virus (1) was created de novo or (2) was formed by mutations caused by direct divine action or (3) resulted from a devolution, or loss of original proper function by loss of information or removal from the environment in which it was designed to function. Those theists who claim that the formation of natural evils such as HIV virus were
either codified into the initial settings of the universe or effected by providence-governed mutations are no more immune to this problem than are the theists who maintain that SCI and IC cannot arise by [providence-governed] chance.
best,
- Bryan
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