There was a time when people believed the moon craters were the product of intelligent design because they were so perfectly round “they must have been made by intelligent creatures living on the moon”. That idea was falsified. If hypothetically someone had said back then, “The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) made the moon craters”, the claim would have been falsifiable, but it really doesn’t make a positive case for the FSM, doesn’t make the FSM directly testable, doesn’t make the FSM science. Substitute the word “ID” instead for “FSM”, and one will see why I think even though ID is falsifiable, I don’t think ID has a positive case, and I don’t think ID is directly testable, and I don’t think ID is science at least for things like biology.
I accept stonehenge was intelligently designed because I’ve seen humans make similar artifacts. The case of design in life is a different matter because we have not seen a designer of such qualifications directly. If we saw God or some UFO sending flames down from the sky with a great voice and turning a rock into a living human, then I would consider ID a positive case at that point. For now there is no positive case, but a case based on some level of belief. One might redefine science to allow ID to be defined as science, but I prefer not to promote ID as science. I’m OK with calling ID science for man-made things, but not for God-made things, unless God shows up and gives us a visual demonstration.
NOTES:
Johannes Kepler
The invention of the telescope led scientists to ponder alien civilization. In the early 1600s, astronomer Johannes Kepler believed that because the moon’s craters were perfectly round, they must have been made by intelligent creatures.
Is Anybody Out There?
Not that similar. What problem do you see?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Beutelwolf_fg01.jpg
Way to ignore the argument, Alan
Frankie,
Is there any evidence Axe went through the EF’s distinct steps?
Hi petrushka
I don’t see nor have any problem with these images. I can see that these images are somewhat similar. But I suspect that if the same views of a maned wolf were to be placed next to these images, the grey wolf would be seen as the odd one out. (The maned wolf, although a canid, is not actually a wolf.)
And any other placental mammal skull excluding canids would also be seen as the odd one out.
No one who works with fossils would have any trouble sorting marsupials from placentals. I don’t understand your question regarding cladistics.
But what if you only had a few ancient fossils from long extinct animals to go by? If you didn’t have any examples of soft tissue or body parts to go with these fossils?
If a few old fossils are all you have to go on then that is what you will have to use to construct your cladogram.
What problems did you think I would have with the images you posted?
No it’s not. That’s a CGI representation of a full thylacine skull. The colors are the stress areas the skull sees when biting. The pic comes from here:
Tasmanian tiger’s jaws were too weak to kill sheep
What other “science” do you have for us?
Charlie,I have no idea why you posted these pictures. Your questions make no sense.
It is true that a single bone of a new species presents problems. Until more samples are found, there can be disagreements. But mostly that occurs between closely related species. Not so often at the genus level. Things are more settled than they were ten or 20 years ago.
Were you suggesting there could be confusion between marsupials and placentals, given just the skull part you posted?
Adapa:
Oh my.
Seems to be a link problem.
One doesn’t need fossils to establish there are gaps, one merely needs to look at existing living creatures and see that various creatures have features highly unique to them.
The fossils are needed to establish possibly that there was a transitional.
The problem is that lot of the necessary transitionals are in the soft tissue, and hence there won’t be fossils any way.
So the fossils will be absent for two possible reasons:
1.the transitional never existed
2. the transitional didn’t leave a trace
So now we are left using the data we actually have, and that is genes and organs and whatever.
What is the rate of new genes (not alleles) arriving in the biosphere vs. leaving. A good estimate is that it is negative. Ergo, the necessary new genes for transitionals won’t arrive at a fast enough rate to construct transitionals.
Next, is are transitionals possible even in principle?
For apes to humans, yeah, the case does look good for the evolutionists with what little we actually know, but one could say the lack of a gap is due to our ignorance. 🙂
The gap between non-life to life? Huge.
The gap between prokaryote to eukaryote? Huge.
The gap between unicellularity to multicellularity? Huge, especially for animals.
There are other tough gaps in principle.
Even assuming humans evolved from ape-like creatures, it doesn’t mean we can extrapolate that to other forms of macro evolution.
Sal:
What kind of fossil would you expect as a transitional between life and non-life?
Prokaryote and eukaryote? Single and multi-celled?
Why not start over?
Should be
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14730055
Not sure why it got hosed. I did get a laugh as this reminded me of Cornelius Hunter’s royal screw up with his thylacine pics. 😄
Just another example of genetic entropy at work.
Extinction. You can’t explain that.
Ah, the good old days, when creationists with PhDs in biology couldn’t tell the difference between a marsupial and a placental.
But wait. They still can’t.
I’m sure you’re trying to make some point. But I’m not sure what it is>
But that’s why they need sharp guys like you to set them straight. 🙂
PS
Hunter’s PhD was in biophysics and bioinformatics, not biology.
There isn’t even a case for SETI much less a positive one.
You and Hunter would make a good tag team.
Perhaps he would complete the thought you started about missing fossils.
Imagine my surprise.
None because it doesn’t work in principle, and even if it existed, it would be gone by now since such biological materials aren’t well preserved.
And what he lacked in that instance was integrity, not knowledge.
Whoosh.
You left out the “http://” part. So it was taken to be a relative link (relative to the current page). I’ve fixed it.
Funny that now Sal has no problems seeing my posts but all those others I made with scientific evidence that directly refuted his ID stupidity were invisible. Not that I’m the slightest bit surprised by IDer cowardice.
Sal, you started a post implying there were missing fossil transitionals, then inexplicably veered off into OOL and single celled evolution.
Are you going to come back and tell us what fossil transitionals are missing?
I thought I listed them. Here are the gaps missing transitionals in the fossil record.
Fossil. I don’t think that means what you think it means.
Unless we are getting all metaphorical, all of a sudden.
That’s possible. Not the first time I haven’t understood something. 🙂
Sal, what would you expect the preserved remains of a transitional between prokaryote and a eukaryote to look like?
Such a transitional exists only in one’s imagination
Frankie,
But non-material all powerful designer is legit 😉
I don’t think a transitional can exist in principle, so I have no opinion.
I would think that’s more a problem for an evolutionary view since evolution expects transitionals.
I also said if they hypothetically did exist, they wouldn’t leave any remains.
Andy Knoll claims he can find early life pre-Cambrian. He was supposedly digging in pre-Cambrian outcrops. Not to mention that this seems a little absurd to me, but granting he was digging up bacterial fossils, I don’t know how good the soft tissue is to make much of any analysis.
So if there are remains, they aren’t going to be of much use.
petrushka,
Did you see my clarification about what I had in mind? “Feathers” and “amniotic eggs”, etc. You would need intermediates for those things. We don’t see them.
And, to be very specific, this is in regard to the concept of common descent. Poodles and wolves are much more similar than no feathers and modern bird feathers: that is a break in continuity.
Life has been on the planet for over 3.5 billion years, almost 2.5 billion years before the Cambrian. The oldest multicellular life known dates back to 2.1 billion years ago.
Oldest Multicellular Life Revealed In Detail
Maybe if IDers spent less time flipping coins and more time reading the scientific literature we wouldn’t see these embarrassments by them.
Yes PaV, we do see them. Here’s a paper describing protofeathers that date back to the late Cretaceous
A Diverse Assemblage of Late Cretaceous Dinosaur and Bird Feathers from Canadian Amber
Creationists. So much ignorance, so little desire to learn.
That’s why I asked for examples. Any examples more than five years old are worthless.
But trend line is the important thing. Creationism is up for a margin call, and has leveraged its assets.
I’d really like to hear the ID-Creationist explanation for these 2.1 billion year old fossils. I’m especially interested in hearing how they fit in with Meyer’s “Darwin’s Doubt” Cambrian claims since these animals were around some 1.5 billion years before then.
Here’s the open access research paper describing the finds.
The 2.1 Ga Old Francevillian Biota: Biogenicity, Taphonomy and Biodiversity
I expect this will be one more case of the old adage – the quickest way to clear a room of Creationists is to start posting scientific papers. 😀
Well you’ve got me on that one. That image was on my computer and I don’t remember where it came from.
But although you have exposed the image as being incorrect, my argument remains unaffected. Compared to the skull of a dolphin the skull of a maned wolf and the skull of a thylacine look remarkably similar. Marsupials moles and Cape golden moles even more so.
IMO this is not because of external environmental forces, but it is due to the way that their bodily form follows the archetype. Animals have a group nature which dictates their form within the limits set by the archetype.
Dogs are very plastic in their form as we can see by looking at poodles and bulldogs. But we can still recognise them as dogs. Canids have followed the archetype in a one sided way and humans have molded them into even narrower channels within this dog nature.
I’d say that the “intelligence” in canid “design” has its source in the being of the group. The “intelligence” in tweaking the “design” to produce domestic dogs is human. The latter demonstrates that “intelligence” does not equate to wisdom.
As I see it animals in their group nature have a higher intelligence and show greater wisdom than individual humans do.
This is not science as it is generally understood but I don’t really care if it is or isn’t.
Your opinion and $4.50 will get you a grande latte at Starbuck’s. It’s what you can demonstrate, not just assert, that counts.
New leading candidate for 2016 understatement of the year.
Why is Sal still insisting that ID is not science because it’s not repeatable… because it ‘s about events that (pre-supposedly) only happened once and can never ever happen again? That’s not what repeatability means
Irreducible complexity is directly testable and it is still a positive case for ID.
To Sal he thinks only absolute proof is a positive case.:
Unfortunately for Sal science disagrees
Goethe’s way of science is a “gentle empiricism”. This means observing nature with care and with as few preconceptions as you can manage. The less you force her to reveal the more of her true self she will open up to you. Goethe coined the term “morphology” for the ever changing form of living beings. And the human mind is in the unique position to be able to “see” an organism in its more complete, living form and not just in the snapshot provided by our sense impressions.
We must use our senses to gain the most exact picture of the organism we are studying. But then we contemplate how one form changes into another, how growth and decay play their part in the being jand becoming of the individual, of the kind, and of life as a whole. This leads me to a better understanding of the natural world. Modern science is very good at helping us with the first of these activities, but the second we must do for ourselves.
And this I cannot demonstrate to you, nor would I wish to. Because we can only demonstrate this to ourselves through personal experience. And that is what counts.
I sit in Starbucks with a grande cappuccino writing this post and I will gladly buy you a drink and listen to your opinions. But the flight you will have to pay for yourself.
stcordova,
An even better estimate is that it is approximately steady state … 🙂
Ugh. There aren’t ‘necessary genes’ for organisms that don’t exist yet. There are just genes. Sometimes they change, and change is cumulative. Everything is ‘transitional’, between its ancestors and its descendants.
Sometimes, we transitionals leave neither fossils nor descendants.
PaV,
This says all anyone needs to know about your critical thinking ability.
Until you can demonstrate how to calculate the amount of complex specified information what you wrote is literally nonsense.
You should read what you write before hitting the send button. Or don’t, it’s more amusing this way.
You say that “the energy of the sun is plenty enough to fuel the increased entropy of cellular life” is wrong.
Then you immediately say “there’s enough energy available for something like that to happen” is correct. You are contradicting yourself in the space of two sentences.
There is no way to understand the claim that the second law prohibits evolution that makes it correct.
The remedy is to either provide a calculation or admit that CSI is a bogus metric.
Much as Patrick and I disagree on just about every thing, he was right about CSI. I publicly took his side with the most tepid wording as I could and still agree a while back:
I now more forcefully agree with Patrick now that I decided to stand up to Arrington’s bullying.
PS
I only tolerated Arrington because I didn’t want the headaches of running and moderating an active blog — TSZ for example has quite a large volunteer staff relative to the number or actually commenters!
Patrick,
You have been provided with such a calculation of CSI. All you do is deny or ignore. That reflects poorly on you, not CSI
CSI is so big that when one googles “calculation of CSI” all one gets is “Customer Satisfaction Index” XDDDDDDDDDD
Second page,
Cost Schedule Index,
Common source inductance,
Chemical Shift Index,
Cerebral state index,
bwaaaahahahahahaha!!!
Frankie,
Link? Is it caek?
CharlieM,
Charlie, I enjoyed this post.
LoL. Good for you Salvador! You’ll not stand up to being bullied here at TSZ for sure, and all you bullies here at TSZ are on notice!