So your an Athiest

[Whateverist]

I'll attempt to define biological information: Irregular sequential organization of monomers, that have no chemical preference for their order, that exist in a way that allows them to accomplish a complex set of goals.

Translation: "I'll attempt to co-opt yet another term from science into my bible centered worldview."

Go get em' champ.

[AAA]

This will be my last response on this page, because I'm sick of us arguing in circles and not getting anywhere. I don't know that we were produced by an intelligence, but I think that it is a better explanation for the design (which all cases of design where we know the origin proceeds from intelligence) that we see. Until better evidence can reasonably explain a bottom up process that leads to information and increasing complexity, my default position is that the intelligent information had an intelligent designer. You say that life forms show absolutely no evidence of top-down design. That is just a misinformed assertion with no basis in the facts. It shows plenty of evidence of design with complex interplay, and you really have to stretch the theory of evolution to account for their interactivity. Our genome seems to be decreasing in function as time goes on which is more consistent with a top-down design than a bottom up design. Thanks for putting up with my thoughts, and please look at the scientific evidence objectively and keep an open mind. I will try to do the same.

You contradict yourself here by saying you don't know we are a product of intelligence, while insisting that a design exists. You can't have it both ways - if there is a design, then there must be an intelligence behind it! The problem is that there really is no evidence for a design, and the world will probably never see such evidence, no matter how you insist there is. Mix certain elements and compounds together, and the result can have properties unlike either of the components that went into it. We don't know precisely why this happens, but scientists don't jump to conclusions - this is not evidence of design, nor is the far greater complexity of form which evolved and eventually became self-aware over 4.5 billion years. There is no direct evidence that it started by accident, but the fossil record makes it very clear that it began much simpler than you can imagine, and simple enough that it probably was an accident of physical chemistry. This would set up the machine that went on ticking away, producing new information each time another accident occured and continued onward. It's the simplest explanation, which is usually the best one.

What a complicated existence you theists lead, when you have something to prove which you should know you never will. What can be asserted without evidence really can be dismissed without evidence!

If you think abiogenesis was simple, you better go to a biology class and learn just how not simple it is for self replication. The fossil record is incredibly lacking when it comes to the transition from non life to life. One of the first thing that appears is stromatolites, which are structures still produced by bacteria today. If you want to go by the fossil record, then you have to say that the first life was the same type of life as the life today. Talk about contradiction. And if you say design must have a designer, you have accepted God or rejected many evolutionary biologists. A lot say that it is designed, they just say the design arose by undirected natural processes.

---

I'll attempt to define biological information: Irregular sequential organization of monomers, that have no chemical preference for their order, that exist in a way that allows them to accomplish a complex set of goals.

Translation:  "I'll attempt to co-opt yet another term from science into my bible centered worldview."

Go get em' champ.

You try to define biological information then if you're so smart. It isn't easy. Plus every statement in my definition is true.

[Esquilax]

You say that life doesn't reflect intelligent design. Flaws in what way?

Well, okay, just off the top of my head, the nerves in the human back are arranged pretty terribly for a bipedal animal- the reason you get pinched nerves and a whole lot of nerve-related back pains is due to this- but they're arranged just so for forward sloping quadrupedal movement like the other great apes, which is kind of a weird thing for a designer to do if they knew we'd be walking upright. Our eyes could be improved nearly across the board by simply shucking the plan that we have and replicating the squid eye, and frankly it's completely ridiculous that you have two organs that you think are designed to do the exact same thing, yet are completely different designs where one is objectively worse, and those designs just so happen to align with established patterns of evolutionary divergence. You could eliminate a whole lot of arthritis and joint based problems simply by reversing the joint on our knee.

And hey, if every living creature is designed then why does the giraffe have a circuitous, looped nerve in its neck where a straight line could easily be implemented? Why do whales have tiny little vestigial leg bones inside the flesh of their abdomen? Why do flightless birds have wings? I could go on, but the fact is, if each of these organisms is intelligently designed then these clear, obvious flaws wouldn't exist, or else you've got a severely inept designer, or one attempting to make it look as though these things evolved naturally without any design.

You say you think life reflects what you would expect to see if the only thing being acted upon was the organisms ability to survive, yet life has many features that go beyond the basics of survival and reproduction.

Sure, but you're misunderstanding me: things evolve via random mutations, so of course there are going to be elements of life that aren't strictly for survival. What I'm saying is that those things do not behave as though they were designed, rather like they had come into existence randomly and been intensified or removed based on how well that organism survives and reproduces, without thought to the comfort of the organism or the efficacy of the feature. Like the giraffe example from earlier: long necked giraffes survived better, and so the long necked gene got passed on, which eventually gave giraffes long necks without care for how a long neck could best serve them, which is why they've got long necks but a laryngeal nerve that loops around itself uselessly, because the nerve extended to keep up with the giraffe's evolving neck, instead of being designed that way by a sensible intelligence.

 Life has tremendous complexity and amazing specifically functioning systems in the cell: the communication via signal transduction pathways, genes regulating other genes (try to explain that one with evolution), and molecular machines that are necessary but not sufficient for life. Evolution explains the addition of new genetic information poorly.

Evolution explains it sufficiently: mutations occur in such a way that DNA sequences are replicated redundantly and changed all the time, which is by all accounts new information. There's simply no need to posit an intelligence to resolve this, given that all you have to go on is cherry-picked examples of complexity, a willingness to ignore those areas that seem to contradict your conclusion, and observations that are consistent with design without being indications of it.

Besides which, "evolution explains this poorly," is not a reason to accept the design conclusion. It's just an argument from ignorance: if evolution didn't explain it at all, you would have no better reason to accept design without evidence of design. Positive evidence, not just intuitively consistent observations that have other, more parsimonious explanations.

Point mutations are so infrequent that to expect them to compile themselves in the necessary order to form a new gene without at any point crippling the organism's ability to survive is unrealistic. Other forms of mutation such as recombination events are still not adding new information, they are just rearranging and modifying pre-existing information. 

So, I have to ask: why do you think "information" is a concept that is at all relevant to this discussion? Information is an inherently conceptual thing, it is nothing more than order retroactively identified in a pre-existing state by subjective human experience, it's not some objectively real quantity, certainly not something required for life to exist. It's just a pattern that we see afterward, made into an arbitrary label by creationists so they could have an objection to evolution. It doesn't actually matter to a discussion of genetics.

Evolution is not readily demonstrable, and to say that it is so is spreading ignorance.

You can see it happening in the lab across multiple species, both naturally and at the behest of human experimentation. It's readily demonstrable in that what the process actually describes can be seen and caused to happen by human intervention, and it's only by scrabbling to redefine the term away from what the term means that you can get to a state that's not "readily demonstrable."

If we can see bacteria evolving the capacity to digest a compound that they demonstrably did not have the ability to do so in earlier generations, then I no longer need to hear this lie that it's not demonstrable.

Sure changes occur, but point me to one increase in complexity.

Bacteria evolving the ability to digest nylon over generations. Skinks in Australia evolving the ability to hatch live births in addition to laying eggs. Italian Wall Lizards evolving entirely new digestive structures never before seen in the species, in an isolated, introduced population, in order to function with a changed diet. All new abilities, including new physiological structures, making the animals more complex.

Now in return, I'd like you to point me to a single mainstream definition of evolution that specifies that it only counts as evolving if the organism increases in complexity. I'll wait.

I think the genome is decreasing in functionality because virtually all diseases are the result of mutations arising in protein coding sequences of the genome resulting in a defective genome. Diseases are increasing in the population (partially due to poor lifestyle, but also due to defective alleles becoming more common). 

But not all diseases are permanent, or inflict permanent damage. That's a highly specious claim you're making there.

I'll attempt to define biological information: Irregular sequential organization of monomers, that have no chemical preference for their order, that exist in a way that allows them to accomplish a complex set of goals.

Which only leads to a further question: how did you determine that there were any pre-existing goals present at all?

Moreover, aren't you just attempting to define a problem into existence by arbitrarily attaching a label laden with self serving implications onto an already extant phenomena for no reason at all?

[The Valkyrie]

If humanity was truly intelligently designed by a powerful, all knowing being, he's pretty damned incompetent.

[AAA]

If humanity was truly intelligently designed by a powerful, all knowing being, he's pretty damned incompetent.

Elaborate

[Redbeard The Pink]

If humanity was truly intelligently designed by a powerful, all knowing being, he's pretty damned incompetent.

Elaborate

Honestly, I think Esquilax pretty well covered it. If you really look at the evidence objectively, it becomes very clear that life's apparent "design" is actually the result of years and years of generation after generation of living things adapting to whatever conditions happened to be at hand. Various creatures (including humans) have vestigial limbs, organs, and other parts that do nothing useful and mostly serve as nothing more than sources of injury and illness.


An omnipotent designer could go back to the drawing board and fix or discard problems rather than having to just work around whatever the issue happens to be, leaving leftover parts and genes that don't do anything. An omniscient one could spot those problems from the outset and design everything to genetic perfection (which is not what's observed in nature--sorry to burst your bubble) before he even gets started making anything.

[AAA]

Elaborate

Honestly, I think Esquilax pretty well covered it. If you really look at the evidence objectively, it becomes very clear that life's apparent "design" is actually the result of years and years of generation after generation of living things adapting to whatever conditions happened to be at hand. Various creatures (including humans) have vestigial limbs, organs, and other parts that do nothing useful and mostly serve as nothing more than sources of injury and illness.


An omnipotent designer could go back to the drawing board and fix or discard problems rather than having to just work around whatever the issue happens to be, leaving leftover parts and genes that don't do anything. An omniscient one could spot those problems from the outset and design everything to genetic perfection (which is not what's observed in nature--sorry to burst your bubble) before he even gets started making anything.

I don't think there are vestigial organs. Most of the time a structure with an unknown function will be labeled as a vestige by evolutionists, only to have its function discovered later. Although I would agree that the idea of vestigial organs is biologically possible, because we know that biological information degrades in function rapidly if it isn't under selective pressure (aka  fish that live in underwater caves losing their eyesight). But that fits well within the constraints of biological change that is possible still with the top-down view of biological life. Degradation of the genetic code information is demonstrable, but improving it is not.

---

You say that life doesn't reflect intelligent design. Flaws in what way?

Well, okay, just off the top of my head, the nerves in the human back are arranged pretty terribly for a bipedal animal- the reason you get pinched nerves and a whole lot of nerve-related back pains is due to this- but they're arranged just so for forward sloping quadrupedal movement like the other great apes, which is kind of a weird thing for a designer to do if they knew we'd be walking upright. Our eyes could be improved nearly across the board by simply shucking the plan that we have and replicating the squid eye, and frankly it's completely ridiculous that you have two organs that you think are designed to do the exact same thing, yet are completely different designs where one is objectively worse, and those designs just so happen to align with established patterns of evolutionary divergence. You could eliminate a whole lot of arthritis and joint based problems simply by reversing the joint on our knee.

And hey, if every living creature is designed then why does the giraffe have a circuitous, looped nerve in its neck where a straight line could easily be implemented? Why do whales have tiny little vestigial leg bones inside the flesh of their abdomen? Why do flightless birds have wings? I could go on, but the fact is, if each of these organisms is intelligently designed then these clear, obvious flaws wouldn't exist, or else you've got a severely inept designer, or one attempting to make it look as though these things evolved naturally without any design.

You say you think life reflects what you would expect to see if the only thing being acted upon was the organisms ability to survive, yet life has many features that go beyond the basics of survival and reproduction.

Sure, but you're misunderstanding me: things evolve via random mutations, so of course there are going to be elements of life that aren't strictly for survival. What I'm saying is that those things do not behave as though they were designed, rather like they had come into existence randomly and been intensified or removed based on how well that organism survives and reproduces, without thought to the comfort of the organism or the efficacy of the feature. Like the giraffe example from earlier: long necked giraffes survived better, and so the long necked gene got passed on, which eventually gave giraffes long necks without care for how a long neck could best serve them, which is why they've got long necks but a laryngeal nerve that loops around itself uselessly, because the nerve extended to keep up with the giraffe's evolving neck, instead of being designed that way by a sensible intelligence.

 Life has tremendous complexity and amazing specifically functioning systems in the cell: the communication via signal transduction pathways, genes regulating other genes (try to explain that one with evolution), and molecular machines that are necessary but not sufficient for life. Evolution explains the addition of new genetic information poorly.

Evolution explains it sufficiently: mutations occur in such a way that DNA sequences are replicated redundantly and changed all the time, which is by all accounts new information. There's simply no need to posit an intelligence to resolve this, given that all you have to go on is cherry-picked examples of complexity, a willingness to ignore those areas that seem to contradict your conclusion, and observations that are consistent with design without being indications of it.

Besides which, "evolution explains this poorly," is not a reason to accept the design conclusion. It's just an argument from ignorance: if evolution didn't explain it at all, you would have no better reason to accept design without evidence of design. Positive evidence, not just intuitively consistent observations that have other, more parsimonious explanations.

Point mutations are so infrequent that to expect them to compile themselves in the necessary order to form a new gene without at any point crippling the organism's ability to survive is unrealistic. Other forms of mutation such as recombination events are still not adding new information, they are just rearranging and modifying pre-existing information. 

So, I have to ask: why do you think "information" is a concept that is at all relevant to this discussion? Information is an inherently conceptual thing, it is nothing more than order retroactively identified in a pre-existing state by subjective human experience, it's not some objectively real quantity, certainly not something required for life to exist. It's just a pattern that we see afterward, made into an arbitrary label by creationists so they could have an objection to evolution. It doesn't actually matter to a discussion of genetics.

Evolution is not readily demonstrable, and to say that it is so is spreading ignorance.

You can see it happening in the lab across multiple species, both naturally and at the behest of human experimentation. It's readily demonstrable in that what the process actually describes can be seen and caused to happen by human intervention, and it's only by scrabbling to redefine the term away from what the term means that you can get to a state that's not "readily demonstrable."

If we can see bacteria evolving the capacity to digest a compound that they demonstrably did not have the ability to do so in earlier generations, then I no longer need to hear this lie that it's not demonstrable.

Sure changes occur, but point me to one increase in complexity.

Bacteria evolving the ability to digest nylon over generations. Skinks in Australia evolving the ability to hatch live births in addition to laying eggs. Italian Wall Lizards evolving entirely new digestive structures never before seen in the species, in an isolated, introduced population, in order to function with a changed diet. All new abilities, including new physiological structures, making the animals more complex.

Now in return, I'd like you to point me to a single mainstream definition of evolution that specifies that it only counts as evolving if the organism increases in complexity. I'll wait.

I think the genome is decreasing in functionality because virtually all diseases are the result of mutations arising in protein coding sequences of the genome resulting in a defective genome. Diseases are increasing in the population (partially due to poor lifestyle, but also due to defective alleles becoming more common). 

But not all diseases are permanent, or inflict permanent damage. That's a highly specious claim you're making there.

I'll attempt to define biological information: Irregular sequential organization of monomers, that have no chemical preference for their order, that exist in a way that allows them to accomplish a complex set of goals.

Which only leads to a further question: how did you determine that there were any pre-existing goals present at all?

Moreover, aren't you just attempting to define a problem into existence by arbitrarily attaching a label laden with self serving implications onto an already extant phenomena for no reason at all?

Listen, I wish you would have been on this thread yesterday when I had more time and was more interested in discussing it, because you have a lot of interesting points. I appreciate you answering with specifics, when a lot of people's answers have just been condescending and name calling. I was just about to be done commenting on this thread when you arrived, and I really don't feel like getting into the specifics again. I'll try to cover some of those very good points (not sarcasm). Yes we do get back pains, but the reality is that our species takes very poor care of its body, so we can't blame all physiological problems that we encounter on our basal anatomy.  I'll make a prediction now that says that if we give our bodies proper nutrition and use all muscle groups on a regular basis, our bodies will regulate themselves remarkably well and take care of the problems it encounters. Also sometimes design must compromise. The idea is that you increase all the variables in a system to the highest point that they can be without decreasing the function of others. For example, you want to build the best ship possible. You could make it smaller and lighter and it would be faster. You could make it bigger and heavier to enable it to carry more. You could make it wider to make it rock less. You could improve its shape to make it sail more smoothly. You can only improve one variable so much before it starts to negatively affect the system as a whole. You could make the most optimal ship for all the variables, but you could still build a faster ship. Or a sturdier ship. You get the idea? I'm not saying that this is always the case in anatomy, but I believe it is true to an extent. The giraffe thing is interesting. However, I have to ask if you have ever dissected a cadaver and looked its nervous system? I have, and take my word (or don't, idc) for it; you don't usually see nerves that don't branch off many times along the way. I'll make another prediction that it branches off several times to allow it to regulate multiple areas and a straight nerve from one location to the ending location would not allow it to regulate them. This is already getting long, so I'll try to tackle the evolution thing quickly. I know the supposed mechanisms for evolution. I (and many PhD scientists) agree that these mechanisms are insufficient to produce the new information. It seems to reason that slight modifications could build up over time and lead to substantial changes, but the reality is that these random changes impair the function of proteins. There are many evidences that directly contradict evolution, but if I give one to you, you will likely say I'm arguing from ignorance and we will figure out later how it works. Just a quick example, Rhizobacteria colonize the roots of legumes. the legumes have specific enzymes that escort the bacteria to their nodule. The legumes have another enzyme (I think it's leghemoglobin) that carry trace amounts of oxygen to the bacteria so that they can undergo metabolism and survive. The bacteria then take atmospheric nitrogen (N2, which if you know about chemistry its two triple bonded atoms, so it isn't easy to break) and convert it into usable nitrogen for the plant so that it can make nucleic acids and whatnot. Without this complex interaction between the two being spot on precise, then the nitrogen would not get fixed and the plants would die. How would the plants survive enough generations to slowly evolve this interaction when its absence leads to their inability to evolve? Information is not a term that I just made up, I think anyone who studies genetics recognizes that there is information in the DNA just as much as there is information in this sentence. As for the need for the increase in complexity, I don't know if there is a mainstream definition that says it, but surely you aren't denying that it needs to happen. As for my definition of biological information, yeah it wasn't the best, but enzymes do attempt to accomplish a goal. Obviously they aren't doing it consciously or anything, but I think you can agree with the terminology if I say the goal of DNA polymerase is to replicate the genome. Maybe the word 'purpose' is better.

Wow that took a long time

[Wyrd of Gawd]

The major flaw is thinking that current animals and plants are resistant to change. We know that plants evolve. Scientists create new ones regularly. Animals, including humans, also change over time. In 100,000 years humans will look completely different from us. If you could live for the next 100,000 years it's doubtful you would even notice the daily changes. They would only be apparent if you compared them at tens of thousands of years apart. In other words, a span of 100 years is too short. You need to compare at 25 thousand, 50 thousand, 75 thousand, and 100 thousand year points to see the changes. At the 500,000 year point you would probably think you are looking at space aliens from a distant solar system instead of humans from Earth who have always been here.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

If humanity was truly intelligently designed by a powerful, all knowing being, he's pretty damned incompetent.

Elaborate

This could quickly degenerate to the level of "your mama" jokes, but:

Your god is so incompetent that Christians had to invent "original sin" and "free will" as excuses for all the shit (evil) that he failed to clean up when he walked off the job, grumbling "Oh, the hell with it!" Then he got really piss-drunk for the next 4 thousand years, as chronicled in the Old Testament.

[Mr Greene]

I was sent to a catholic primary school, shortly after first communion (aprox. age 7) I realised that what was being said did not gel with the reality I experienced, as such I was left with the inescapable conclusion that none of it was true.
Fast forward to last year of university, my house-mate was religious and made some off the cuff statement about there being vast amounts of evidence but was unable to substantiate.
I was by this point fully capable of conducting my own academic research the results of which were shocking in the damnation of the OT as a heap of contrived lies largely plagiarised from Sumerian sources (Epic of Gilgamesh, Epic of Sargon) and ultimately dating to around 450BCE (or at least the narrative doesn't directly contradict physical archaeological sources after this point) though the sheer volume of fakes and forgeries presented as evidence leads me to wonder if there is anything worth bothering with in the whole of Abrahamic monotheism.

Taking up Dawkins meme theory and the survival benefit hypothesis leads me to suspect this can be demonstrated with the Prose Edda (Norse) for reindeer/caribou hunters, ref; Ray Mears.

Still researching Mahabharata