Hey folks:
Went away this weekend will be responding to several posts hopefully today,
if not, sometime this week.
Chris:
Many ID advocates scoff scornfully at the evidence of
animal breeding, mathematics, information theory,
empirical genetics, and rigorously designed computer
evolution of information strings of various sorts, that all
demonstrate (beyond even a remotely sane objection to
anyone who actually knows anything about how these
things work and their results) that information *can* (and
indeed *does*) sometimes increase (by *any* measure of
information) via random variations in an existing string
of information.
Nelson:
Actually what they say is that natural processes cannot generate complex
specified information.
Chris:
The criticism that I've seen most often is that the
experimenter/animal breeder/computer programmer/etc.
is playing the role of the designer in these cases.
But, is this true (and, if it is in some cases, does it
*need* to be true for the same type of results to occur?)?
As usual, the short answer is No.
A longer answer is First, ID theory typically claims that
*their* designer is either creating new species (or new
"forms" of life -- as if a new species was not a new form)
Nelson:
No intelligent design theory does not claim that the designer is creating
new species.
Chris:
-- or manipulating the *variations* in an otherwise
self-running process. We have yet to see any new forms
spring from nothing, so this whole line of argument is
obviously without evidentiary basis (with one caveat that
I may deal with later).
Nelson:
The cell, and irreducibly complex machines , body plans that characterize
phyla are all systems made "from scratch".
Chris:
The other line, that the designer manipulates variations to
insert otherwise-impossible information into the DNA,
combined with their claims that selection is unimportant
(which, in a sense it is) is, however *not* compatible
with their critique of the evidence mentioned above,
because the flaws in *those*
(if any) are in the *selection* mechanism, which they
also claim *cannot* put information into the DNA.
Nelson:
DNA itself is information, thus, it's design was also from scratch.
Chris:
So, then, if people breed animals entirely by selection
(which, until modern knowledge of DNA, they *did*), it
is obvious from their one premises that this method does
*not* constitute *design* in their sense.
Nelson:
Only if you use straw man and faulty premises like it was done in this post.
It is extremely important that when attempting to mimic natural processes
that you do not let "intelligence" do all the work thus rendering the
experiment irrelevant. This is an issue that is not only brought up by
design theorists but also by evolutionists:
Steven A. Benner, "Catalysis: Design Versus Selection," Science 261 (1993):
1402-1403; p. 1403.
Thus it is a _real_ issue not just an apologetic.
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