The Problem with Christians

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There is a fine line between observations and speculation. Chemistry is not speculative, you can measure amounts of reactants and products and intermediates to develop mechanisms for reactions. Speculative chemistry would be saying that chemicals could get together to form life on their own. 

I'm not saying you can't speculate. I'm saying that speculation is not the same as empiricism. You can compare multiple speculations against the evidence to see which one is more likely to have happened. But if you have only have one hypothesis that works after centuries of the brightest people in the world trying to come up with an alternative, then you can reasonably say that it is likely to be true.

Chemistry is not speculative; it's just physics applied to become Atomic Theory, which forms the basis of chemistry.

However, because there are literally billions of ways you can react a few basic chemicals (especially ones involving Carbon), it's hardly surprising that after only a few decades to a century of "modern" chemistry, we haven't nailed down the full process of how life began over four billion years ago. What we HAVE done, amazingly, is to nail down several of the steps of how the precursor chemicals form in the first place (in interstellar cometary ice, which I think is awesome!) and done experiments that show how those chemicals can arrange into higher order complexity, given an energy input and the right conditions.

The very complexity of proteins/enzymes you seem to think is impossible seems to begin to appear any time we even come close to the right conditions. I would be surprised if we have not solved this puzzle within the next 20 years. However, given the fact that we see these reactions happening at all means we are on the right track-- while it is speculative to say that life arose from basic chemical reactions, it's a pretty reasonable conclusion given what we do know.

It's NOT reasonable to say "Well we haven't solved the problem yet, so... magic!"

You're also being unreasonable when you look only at the modern versions of those long-evolved DNA sequences and declare that it's impossible to get from low complexity to what exists now. What you're doing is looking at a fully-constructed cathedral and declaring that it cannot be built because bricks cannot stack on top of one another in that way...ignoring the scaffolding that it took to get the arches and flying buttresses erected, which was then later removed.

DNA works like that, in a population, particularly where duplication mutations (fairly common) are involved, and one of the duplicated genes mutates in a new direction and eventually acquires a new function after numerous generations, while the original gene keeps doing its job. When Michael Behe first proposed some of his "irreducibly complex" systems, biologists (mainly grad students, since PhDs in biochem typically have more important things to do) showed the steps by which the "mousetrap" was built from previously-existing systems. Behe, of course, along with the ID/IC crowd, completely ignored the implications of showing that System A did in fact evolve, even after they claimed ID/IC, and instead moved on to declare that System B could not have evolved. So the teams solved that one. And now it's System C. Really, guys?

When pressed, on the stand, in the Dover case, Behe admitted he had not read the dozens of papers which showed the things he was claiming (under oath!) could not possibly happen did in fact happen. It's the reason one of the most conservative federal judges in that district ruled strongly against the Intelligent Design crowd, in his Opinion. You should read it--no joke, it really goes into detail about why your ideas don't hold water--and cease making arguments that cannot withstand actual scrutiny.

Does evolutionary biology have every single possible issue solved? Of course not. Likely, it never will, as the universe has innumerable mysteries for us to solve. But pointing out that things are really complicated, and we just don't know is not an argument. You may be a biology student, but many of your arguments I've read here make it sound like you're expecting one individual DNA set to evolve sequentially, and that's not how it works. When you've completed your Genetics course, and learned how population genetics work, we can talk about it. But please, check your biases at the door and just learn, while you're paying for college.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I think you must be lying if you say that the very complex proteins begin to appear any time we have close to the right conditions. If you're talking about naturally occurring amino acids, then that isn't the same a proteins. That's like saying we see lightning in nature, therefore computers may form if the electricity strikes the right thing in the right sequence. 

And it is reasonable to say we see a feature that is created all the time by intelligence. If we are trying to explain that same feature (irregular sequential information), then there is no reason that intelligence should not be considered as a possible cause. 

I like the cathedral example. It would be completely illogical to assume that the bricks were ordered that way on their own. They needed a designer. I realize that this wasn't the point of the example though. We can invoke unobserved scaffolding as well, but if it is not empirical to invoke unobserved processes/enzymes in order to explain how it arose. It is just as speculative as saying it all came into existence at once because we see parts that depend on each other. 

There are videos where Behe counters the mousetrap response. But I'm not overly concerned with that. Obviously there is a lot more combined brain power trying to debunk ID than to support it. But I recommend that you read Signature in the Cell. It is an excellent book about the scientific credibility of ID. 


And I've already completed genetics, and I understand how allele frequencies change in a population, but that is hardly an explanation of intricate mechanisms arising. For example I have a test monday in Biochemistry, and one of the topics is how glycogen breakdown and synthesis are inversely regulated. Simple version: Glucagon leads to cAMP which causes protein kinase A to phosphorylate both phosphoryl kinase (now active) and glycogen synthase (now inactiv). Phosphoryl kinase then phosphorylates glycogen phosphorylase (now active), which then becomes active and binds protein phosphatase 1 and degrades glycogen. When there is plenty of glucose, then glycogen phosphorylase switches to its inactive conformation which causes protein phosphatase 1(PP1) to unbind. PP1 then dephosphorylates both glycogen phosphorylase (now inactive ) and glycogen synthase (now active). This elegant mechanism ensures that glycogen breakdown and glycogen synthesis are not occurring at the same time. Failure of these mechanisms lead to pathologies, some of which are lethal. How did they reproduce before they had these mechanisms and how could it evolve without them surviving to reproduce? 

As you can see, evolving this is not the same as evolving a larger beak size (which can probably be explained just be a mutation in the consensus sequence to increase the expression of the protein that leads to beak formation). I'm not too concerned with the ID people, I was doubting all out evolution long before I discovered their arguments.