Intelligent Design

[The Inquisition]

Molecules to man may be worded simply, but it isn't dishonest considering that materialists believe that molecules gradually combined to form either RNA or protein, which then increased in complexity via mutation and natural selection resulting in mankind.

Mutation does not increase complexity. Point mutations just change existing DNA leading to a decrease in function (which can be advantageous in certain environments, but it is still degrading the information). Gene duplication is the evolutionist way of explaining increasing complexity, but duplicated genes are silenced in the offspring, and because natural selection can only work on expressed phenotypes from the protein product of the gene, there is no way for a duplicated gene to eventually settle into a new function if it is not being expressed. The only point mutation that can actually add new nucleotides to the genome are insertion mutations, which are always harmful considering that they push each following codon back one nucleotide, which changes EVERY following amino acid in the protein.
Bacteria have the capability to acquire new genes from the environment or from conjugation, but the genes they acquire were already in existence and are not the result of mutation. I would suspect that this is the case with nylonase. I am skeptical of new digestive structures being produced through mutation. I could see existing structures altering, which is still well within the parameters of the variation I would expect based on how genes are regulated.

Biological information is the specific sequence of nucleotides that produce proteins capable of accomplishing a specific task. Functional sequences are rare, yet our genome's are full of them.

I am a biology major with a chem minor at my university and plan to get a PhD in molecular biology.

Dafuq, I pegged you right - an anti-science major!

Now, let me guess which college. William Jessup? Oral Roberts? Bringham Young?

If he 's going to get a PhD in molecular biology while denying the fact of natural evolution, I'd be really interested in where he places the line between natural evolution that requires no deity and theistic evolution that requires a creator. Where is this dividing line? Be specific!

Your hero Michael Behe draws this line at chloroquine resistance of malaria, is this where you draw the line?

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Dafuq, I pegged you right - an anti-science major!

Now, let me guess which college. William Jessup? Oral Roberts? Bringham Young?

If he 's going to get a PhD in molecular biology while denying the fact of natural evolution, I'd be really interested in where he places the line between natural evolution that requires no deity and theistic evolution that requires a creator. Where is this dividing line? Be specific!

Your hero Michael Behe draws this line at chloroquine resistance of malaria, is this where you draw the line?

Behe is so brilliant! Why aren't other world scientists catching on to his groundbreaking discoveries?

BEHEHEEHEEHEEHEEEEEEEEE!!!

Sorry, I just had to do that.

[robvalue]

So...

Even if evolution is totally wrong, that leaves us with no explanation. Anyone vaguely scientific should know that this doesn't mean "It's magic! It was done by [insert your own pet superstition]". That is the argument from ignorance, and is obviously invalid since you can just insert anything you like. Unless you have evidence for your position, it's worthless. Attacking evolution does not have the effect some people seem to think it does; even if they present a convincing case, which they don't.

Unknown means unknown.

[Pat Mustard]

What's the best way to refute the argument that we were intelligently designed? I've seen the bit that Neil Degrasse Tyson did on it, but what else can I put into my arsenal? (More specifically, about how complex flowers are and other things in nature)

Finally have an answer for this. First remind your friend of the time Shrub nearly died choking on a pretzel. Then ask him if he were the creator would he design a being so easily killed (of course he wouldn't). Now you've a friend cleverer than his god, QED.

[Pat Mustard]

This question is malformed as you have crafted it in such as way that you are implying the presupposition that the "world was designed." This misconception of how the world came to be is something I come across often with theists. 

What is happening is that a theist will think first of what they want to be true...."that a god exists".....then they form a question with the assumption that a god exists when crafting questions in their minds...ie "what we don't know is how our world was designed".... which demonstrations their error in critical thinking. One should first think about the order of things....for example what came first...planet formation or the evolution of man? If you don't know... the answer is planet formation....and then mankind eventually ....over a time spread that is very very very difficult to wrap our human brains around.....Richard Dawkins often refers to the principles of evolution as climbing mount improbable. The truth is that the animals, bacteria, and whatever else you want to point to came about only due to the conditions of the environment that existed around them for them to come into being in the first place (it could be no other way). In other words Evolution is the opposite of design, and we know that evolution is fact.

Also, how can anyone use the ID argument when you look and see how many human beings suffer from aliments that vary in nature. Notice how many people deteriorate at different rates suffering from an array of suddle to extreme diagnoses. The US healthcare expenditures show at roughly $971 1 billlion dollars in 2014. If a designer was ever in place, he/she did a shitty job. 2. Breaking down in different ways in different variations aligns with the idea of evolutionary principles which directly refutes the designer claim.

Molecules to man evolution is not fact. It isn't that hard to wrap your brain around, and the ID argument is not the argument that results from people not understanding the theory. If you want to believe in evolution, you have to have a natural way to increase the complexity of a living system over time. Studies show mutations to be harmful and degrade the genetic information. These mutations in our originally good genome are what cause these diseases that you are complaining about. There are cellular mechanisms (indicating design) that prevent mutations, but there is only so much it can do when the people in our society fill ourselves with mutagenic chemicals instead of the nutritious fruits and vegetables we were intended to eat. This suffering from diseases is almost entirely due to poor lifestyle or inherited mutations from ancestors with poor lifestyles. It is not the fault of the design or the designer.

with that argument I think you should petition to have you name changed to 'junk status'. It'd have the virtue of being accurate to your honesty and knowledge level.

[Esquilax]

Molecules to man may be worded simply, but it isn't dishonest considering that materialists believe that molecules gradually combined to form either RNA or protein, which then increased in complexity via mutation and natural selection resulting in mankind.

If you present an overly simplified version of what you know to be a highly complex topic, for the purposes of making the idea seem cartoonish and unrealistic, because of a pre-existing ideological desire to discredit the idea, then that's dishonest.

Mutation does not increase complexity. Point mutations just change existing DNA leading to a decrease in function (which can be advantageous in certain environments, but it is still degrading the information).

Again, I must ask you to define genetic information before we begin a conversation about it, and to also explain how it's at all relevant to biological evolution. Moreover, why do you think that evolution describes an increase in genetic information? Because it, you know, doesn't? Like, at all? This is literally just a manufactured contention that has nothing to do with what evolution actually describes. It's irrelevant.

Regarding point mutations, are you conveniently omitting other forms of mutation dishonestly, or are you just not aware that point mutations are not the only kind? Because frameshift mutations do exist, and they can add whole new base pairs to a genome, not to mention repetitions are also possible. Restricting the conversation to just point mutations inaccurately simplifies things.

Gene duplication is the evolutionist way of explaining increasing complexity, but duplicated genes are silenced in the offspring, and because natural selection can only work on expressed phenotypes from the protein product of the gene, there is no way for a duplicated gene to eventually settle into a new function if it is not being expressed.

Just because it's not being expressed in one generation doesn't mean it won't be in the next, or the next, or the next. Evolution works over long periods of time and successive generations; a duplicated gene that persists over multiple generations has the same chance of mutating further than any other gene.

The only point mutation that can actually add new nucleotides to the genome are insertion mutations, which are always harmful considering that they push each following codon back one nucleotide, which changes EVERY following amino acid in the protein.

Point mutations are far from the only kind of mutation there is.

Bacteria have the capability to acquire new genes from the environment or from conjugation, but the genes they acquire were already in existence and are not the result of mutation. I would suspect that this is the case with nylonase.

So you're asserting that there was a gene fit for digesting nylon, a substance that did not exist until 1931, just pre-existing and floating free? Really?

I am skeptical of new digestive structures being produced through mutation. I could see existing structures altering, which is still well within the parameters of the variation I would expect based on how genes are regulated.

It's simple: a population of Italian Wall Lizards got left on a remote island during wartime, as an introduced species in isolation. The offspring of those lizards, faced with a new diet they didn't have normally, evolved entirely new cecal valves within their digestive system to cope. These valves do not exist, in any capacity, within the Wall Lizard populations they came from. By any definition, they are new structures evolving due to differing selective pressures.

Biological information is the specific sequence of nucleotides that produce proteins capable of accomplishing a specific task. Functional sequences are rare, yet our genome's are full of them.

If this is your definition, then surely you'd agree that evolution has already solved your manufactured problem via the existence of frameshift mutations? Or, you know, the fact that evolution doesn't require the production of entirely new information, since rejigged old information would still be a mutation as understood in the definition of evolution?

I am a biology major with a chem minor at my university and plan to get a PhD in molecular biology.

Good luck doing that while rejecting a cornerstone theory supporting the entirety of that field. I'm sure you'll go far; Answers in Genesis are always slavering for more shills with phds they don't use, after all.

[stop_pushing_me]

Molecules to man may be worded simply, but it isn't dishonest considering that materialists believe that molecules gradually combined to form either RNA or protein, which then increased in complexity via mutation and natural selection resulting in mankind.

If you present an overly simplified version of what you know to be a highly complex topic, for the purposes of making the idea seem cartoonish and unrealistic, because of a pre-existing ideological desire to discredit the idea, then that's dishonest.

Mutation does not increase complexity. Point mutations just change existing DNA leading to a decrease in function (which can be advantageous in certain environments, but it is still degrading the information).

Again, I must ask you to define genetic information before we begin a conversation about it, and to also explain how it's at all relevant to biological evolution. Moreover, why do you think that evolution describes an increase in genetic information? Because it, you know, doesn't? Like, at all? This is literally just a manufactured contention that has nothing to do with what evolution actually describes. It's irrelevant.

Regarding point mutations, are you conveniently omitting other forms of mutation dishonestly, or are you just not aware that point mutations are not the only kind? Because frameshift mutations do exist, and they can add whole new base pairs to a genome, not to mention repetitions are also possible. Restricting the conversation to just point mutations inaccurately simplifies things.

Gene duplication is the evolutionist way of explaining increasing complexity, but duplicated genes are silenced in the offspring, and because natural selection can only work on expressed phenotypes from the protein product of the gene, there is no way for a duplicated gene to eventually settle into a new function if it is not being expressed.

Just because it's not being expressed in one generation doesn't mean it won't be in the next, or the next, or the next. Evolution works over long periods of time and successive generations; a duplicated gene that persists over multiple generations has the same chance of mutating further than any other gene.

The only point mutation that can actually add new nucleotides to the genome are insertion mutations, which are always harmful considering that they push each following codon back one nucleotide, which changes EVERY following amino acid in the protein.

Point mutations are far from the only kind of mutation there is.

Bacteria have the capability to acquire new genes from the environment or from conjugation, but the genes they acquire were already in existence and are not the result of mutation. I would suspect that this is the case with nylonase.

So you're asserting that there was a gene fit for digesting nylon, a substance that did not exist until 1931, just pre-existing and floating free? Really?

I am skeptical of new digestive structures being produced through mutation. I could see existing structures altering, which is still well within the parameters of the variation I would expect based on how genes are regulated.

It's simple: a population of Italian Wall Lizards got left on a remote island during wartime, as an introduced species in isolation. The offspring of those lizards, faced with a new diet they didn't have normally, evolved entirely new cecal valves within their digestive system to cope. These valves do not exist, in any capacity, within the Wall Lizard populations they came from. By any definition, they are new structures evolving due to differing selective pressures.

Biological information is the specific sequence of nucleotides that produce proteins capable of accomplishing a specific task. Functional sequences are rare, yet our genome's are full of them.

If this is your definition, then surely you'd agree that evolution has already solved your manufactured problem via the existence of frameshift mutations? Or, you know, the fact that evolution doesn't require the production of entirely new information, since rejigged old information would still be a mutation as understood in the definition of evolution?

I am a biology major with a chem minor at my university and plan to get a PhD in molecular biology.

Good luck doing that while rejecting a cornerstone theory supporting the entirety of that field. I'm sure you'll go far; Answers in Genesis are always slavering for more shills with phds they don't use, after all.

[Angrboda]

I am a biology major with a chem minor at my university and plan to get a PhD in molecular biology.

Jonathan Wells, is that you?

[Old Baby]

I haven't read all 31 pages of this thread so someone else might have said this.

The "If God designed X, why is it screwed up?" argument posed to a Christian is going to be explained with the story of Adam's fall.

In the beginning, everything was perfect. Then, Adam ate the apple and suddenly we had thorns and weeds and back aches and eye problems and guys only living to be 500 instead of 1000.

[Cyberman]

Some perfection, that can get screwed up just by one act of exercising a rigged choice. Yahweh gives the whole concept of gods a bad name; no wonder they all pissed off out of existence. I'd be ashamed too.