It has been claimed that ID is not falsifiable, but I think that any honest evaluation of ID should be able to falsify it. In William Paley's original Argument from Design he asks you to imagine that you are walking along the beach when you come across a pocket watch. So why did you notice a pocket watch rather than any of those lovely beach cobbles? Is it possibly that you can spot an object that has clearly been designed for a single purpose?
So let's pop the hood on humanity and look for design.
- Your genome is degenerate, with 23 possible functions coded for by 64 codons. That's a whole whack of unused data capacity. The genome itself is littered with rubbish and instructions are scattered randomly across 23 different chromosomes. It doesn't read like instructions, or at least not by instructions given by anybody who wasn't raving mad. It reads like instructions that were fed through a wood chipper, along with a phone book and a few shelves of the fiction section and then the fragments were randomly embedded in concrete.
- DNA is a rubbish molecule for data storage. It's pone to methylation, hydroxylation, and dimerization. It readily forms adducts with a variety of naturally occurring molecules that inhibit accurate transcription and replication. Its helical shape requires that it be chopped into segments to prevent excessive rotation during reading. Any computer hardware engineer who made a storage medium this lousy would be shot.
- Cellular biochemistry is a complete nightmare where every reagent has been chucked into the same solution and catalysts are added to get the right things to happen in the desired order. Hopefully. The lack of partitioning of reagents that you find in any sane chemistry lab prevents you from taking advantage of a whole suite of spontaneous reactions. Despite having an aerobic metabolism, most of your biochemistry is anaerobic and your body wastes an inordinate amount of energy keeping oxygen away from anything other than the mitochondria.
- On a larger scale you are a pile of cobbled together homologies and flawed systems, kept alive only because the competition is every bit as ridiculous. You breathe using a system that should be a fish's buoyancy control. You hear using modified jaw bones while your jaw is an ossified gill arch. Your eyes are so poorly constructed that the blood vessels are overlaid on the retina and have to be removed using image processing. The less said about the colocation of the genitals ad the excretory system the better.
And yet, despite the complete lack of anything that appears to have been properly engineered to do anything efficiently, we're supposed to accept that this "design" which is forever perched on the brink of failure was created by something intelligent and sane.
So let's pop the hood on humanity and look for design.
- Your genome is degenerate, with 23 possible functions coded for by 64 codons. That's a whole whack of unused data capacity. The genome itself is littered with rubbish and instructions are scattered randomly across 23 different chromosomes. It doesn't read like instructions, or at least not by instructions given by anybody who wasn't raving mad. It reads like instructions that were fed through a wood chipper, along with a phone book and a few shelves of the fiction section and then the fragments were randomly embedded in concrete.
- DNA is a rubbish molecule for data storage. It's pone to methylation, hydroxylation, and dimerization. It readily forms adducts with a variety of naturally occurring molecules that inhibit accurate transcription and replication. Its helical shape requires that it be chopped into segments to prevent excessive rotation during reading. Any computer hardware engineer who made a storage medium this lousy would be shot.
- Cellular biochemistry is a complete nightmare where every reagent has been chucked into the same solution and catalysts are added to get the right things to happen in the desired order. Hopefully. The lack of partitioning of reagents that you find in any sane chemistry lab prevents you from taking advantage of a whole suite of spontaneous reactions. Despite having an aerobic metabolism, most of your biochemistry is anaerobic and your body wastes an inordinate amount of energy keeping oxygen away from anything other than the mitochondria.
- On a larger scale you are a pile of cobbled together homologies and flawed systems, kept alive only because the competition is every bit as ridiculous. You breathe using a system that should be a fish's buoyancy control. You hear using modified jaw bones while your jaw is an ossified gill arch. Your eyes are so poorly constructed that the blood vessels are overlaid on the retina and have to be removed using image processing. The less said about the colocation of the genitals ad the excretory system the better.
And yet, despite the complete lack of anything that appears to have been properly engineered to do anything efficiently, we're supposed to accept that this "design" which is forever perched on the brink of failure was created by something intelligent and sane.