Irreducible Complexity.

[leo-rcc]

Hi Catherine,

Like the "they" part, pre-emptive striking, nice one.

If I may make a recap:

You suppose there is a designer, because everything to you looks and feels designed, intuitively. You search on the web and there are some scientists that agree with you (Behe, Bergman, Deckert).

You also assert that because it all works so well it must have been designed for us. Douglas Adams frased that rather perfectly:

...imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

When things appear to be one thing because it intuitively makes sense, doesn't mean it is always correct. Now maybe there really was a designer or creator, I don't know. But so far there is no scientific evidence to back it up, unless you count scripture which I don't.

Maybe I'm not understanding these articles.

Well if you continue to read from creationists propaganda websites of course they will confirm your way of thinking because they do the same. No matter who makes a website or writes a book, he can write down his opinion on the subject at hand. This will be published, or put online, and there might be some comments when that is allowed on that website, but there is no peer review, no scientific method passed over these articles and books. This is also why I never quote Dawkins or Harris from their books to prove a scientific point, because even though experts in their respective fields, these books are not scientific papers. I quote Douglas Adams on a more comparative note, he never claimed to be a scientist and neither do I. With regards to Behe even his own faculty denounces ID in favour of Evolution making an official statement to that fact because it does not want to associate itself with the opinions of Behe.

So far all the real scientific evidence points to the opposite of ID, Evolution trough natural selection provides a much better answer although that is not always intuitive.

It will require more reading on the subject, there are literally thousands of scientific studies and papers published the correct way (someone told me 18.000 in 2007 alone but don't hold me to that, it maybe less maybe more).

Here are a few to start of with.

Direct Experimental Tests Of Evolutionary Concepts:

Cavefish as a Model System in Evolutionary Developmental Biology by William R. Jeffrey, Developmental Biology, 231:, 1-12 (1 Mar 2001) - contains experimental tests of hypotheses about eye evolution

Crystal Structure Of An Ancient Protein: Evolution By Conformational Epistasis by Eric A. Ortlund, Jamie T. Bridgham, Matthew R. Redinbo and Joseph W. Thornton, Science, 317: 1544-1548 (14 September 2007) - refers to the reconstruction of ancient proteins from extinct animals by back-tracking along the molecular phylogenetic trees and demonstrating that the proteins in question WORK

Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the laboratory by J.R. Weinberg V. R. Starczak and P. Jora, Evolution vol 46, pp 1214-1220, 1992 - EXPERIMENTAL GENERATION OF A SPECIATION EVENT IN THE LABORATORY

Experimentally Created Incipient Species of Drosophila by Theodosius Dobzhansky & Olga Pavlovsky, Nature 230, pp 289 - 292 (02 April 1971) - EXPERIMENTAL GENERATION OF A SPECIATION EVENT IN THE LABORATORY

Founder-flush speciation in Drosophila pseudoobscura: a large scale experiment by A. Galiana, A. Moya and F. J. Alaya, Evolution vol 47, pp 432-444, 1993 - EXPERIMENTAL GENERATION OF A SPECIATION EVENT IN THE LABORATORY

Genetics of Natural Populations XII. Experimental Reproduction of Some of the Changes Caused by Natural Selection by Sewall Wright & Theodosius Dobzkansky, Genetics, 31(2): 125-156 (1946) - direct experimental tests of natural selection mechanisms

Hedgehog Signalling Controls Eye Degeneration in Blind Cavefish by Yoshiyuki Yamamoto, David W. Stock and William R. Jeffery, Nature, 431: 844-847 (14 Oct 2004) - direct experimental test of theories about eye evolution and the elucidation of the controlling genes involved

Initial Sequencing of the Chimpanzee Genome and Comparison with the Human Genome, The Chimpanzee Genome Sequencing Consortium (see paper for full list of 68 authors), Nature, Vol 437, pp 69-87, 1 September 2005 - direct sequencing of the chimpanzee genome and direct comparison of this genome with the previously sequenced human genome, whereby the scientists discovered that fully twenty-nine percent of the orthologous proteins of humans and chmpanzees are IDENTICAL

Origin of the Superflock of Cichlid Fishes from Lake Victoria, East Africa by Erik Verheyen, Walter Salzburger, Jos Snoeks and Axel Meyer, Science, vol 300, pp 325-329, 11 April 2003 - direct experimental determination of the molecular phylogeny of the Lake Victoria Superflock, including IDENTIFYING THE COMMON ANCESTOR OF THE 350+ SPECIES IN QUESTION and NAMING THAT ANCESTOR as Haplochromis gracilior

Phagotrophy by a flagellate selects for colonial prey: A possible origin of multicellularity by M.E. Boraas, D.B. Seale and J.E. Boxhorn, Evolutionary Ecology Vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 153-164. Feb 1998 - direct experimental test of hypotheses about the origins of multicellularity

Protein engineering of hydrogenase 3 to enhance hydrogen production by T. Maeda, V. Sanchez-Torres and T. K. Wood, Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, 79(1): 77-86 (May 2008) - DIRECT EXPERIMENTAL APPLICATION OF EVOLUTION IN THE LABORATORY TO PRODUCE A NEW BIOTECHNOLOGY PRODUCT

Resurrecting Ancient Genes: Experimental Analysis Of Extinct Molecules by Joseph W. Thornton, Nature Reviews: Genetics, 5: 366-375 (5 May 2004) - direct experimental reconstruction in the laboratory of ancient proteins from extinct animals

Sexual isolation caused by selection for positive and negative phototaxis and geotaxis in Drosophila pseudoobscura by E. del Solar, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol 56, pp 484-487, 1966 - direct experimental test of selection mechanisms and their implications for speciation

The Master Control Gene For Morphogenesis And Evolution Of The Eye by Walter J. Gehrig, Genes to Cells, 1: 11-15, 1996 - direct experimental test of hypotheses concerning eye evolution including the elucidation of the connection between the Pax6 gene and eye morphogenesis, and the experimental manipulation of that gene to control eye development

The Past As The Key To The Present: Resurrection Of Ancient Proteins From Eosinophils by Steven A. Benner, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA., 99(8): 4760-4761 (16 April 2002) - direct experimental reconstruction of ancient proteins from extinct animals.

Now I don't expect you to read all that, I don't even want to read all that. The only point I am trying to make that each and every single one of these studies and scientific peer reviewed papers hold more credence than anything ever put forward by supporters of ID because they have been through the whole scientific process. As I stated before, if people like Behe really want to give credence to ID, they have to do the legwork, and so for that has not been done.