Intelligent Design explains Sex!

A thread for ID proponents to explain their alternative theory for biological phenomena.

Allan Miller has written an article on sex, proposing an evolutionary explanation for why almost all Eukaryota indulge in sex. In response to comments from evolution skeptics questioning his explanation, he challenges them:

OK, you ID types, what’s the Design explanation for sex? You need to explain why all eukaryotes have genes that are involved in meiosis, though some never actually perform meiosis, and in some, the genes are ‘broken’. And you need to explain the taxonomic distribution of asexuality – absent in mammals and birds, but increasingly found as one descends your imagined scala naturae – though intermittent sex remains the norm, even in single celled organisms.

Why? What purpose does it serve that is common to single celled protists and our favourite organism, the chimp? Why wasn’t everything designed to just reproduce asexually?

In response, commenter phoodoo writes:

Why are there legs? Wouldn’t it be better if we just moved like water? Why ten fingers instead of thirty? Why skin? Evolution doesn’t answer these questions any better or worse than ID.

Now, for evolution to have a better or worse explanation than ID, there must be an explanation for sex according to the theory of “Intelligent Design”.

I don’t know of any Intelligent Design theory that attempts to explain biological observations such as sexual reproduction. So I invite those who do know of such a theory to correct my ignorance.

How does the theory of Intelligent Design explain sex?

PS: please feel free to use this thread as a peanut gallery WRT Allan’s article.

402 thoughts on “Intelligent Design explains Sex!

  1. ID explains sex in the same way that decisions work in phoodoo word and the same way phoodoo explains how the FBI use psychics all the time.

    In other words, not at all.

  2. Evolution saying that-it was an accident, but it caused more babies…I don’t call that an explanation.

    Perhaps some people’s curiosity is more easily abated than others. I didn’t get the accidental gene for “easily abated.”

    Why five fingers-it was an accident-but more babies.

    Well, that settles it.

  3. phoodoo: Evolution saying that-it was an accident, but it caused more babies…I don’t call that an explanation.

    That’s a strawman.

    But what do you call an explanation? This thread is about how Intelligent Design explains sex and your contribution is to note how you don’t believe what evolution ‘says’ the answer is?

    You admitting that Intelligent Design has no explanation is noted.

    phoodoo: Perhaps some people’s curiosity is more easily abated than others. I didn’t get the accidental gene for “easily abated.”

    But it seems you did. You are happy that “Intelligent Design’ explains the origin of sex, but are unable to detail what that explanation is.

    So your curiosity is non-existent when it comes to ID, but where evolution is concerned no explanation can ever be detailed enough.

    Double standards much?

    phoodoo: Why five fingers-it was an accident-but more babies.

    Well, that settles it.

    Yes, we all know how you don’t believe any evolutionary explanations. But, again, this thread is where ID says how sex is explained.

    Or is the ID ‘explanation’ something like: Well, we know evolution did not do it, so it must have been an old man in the sky.

  4. phoodoo: Evolution saying that-it was an accident, but it caused more babies…I don’t call that an explanation.

    What do you call an explanation? Is there an alternative explanation to evolutionary theory for the diversity of life on Earth (past and present) that we see? Let’s, for the sake of argument, dismiss evolutionary theory as an explanation. What does that leave us?

    ETA ninja’d 😉

  5. phoodoo

    (Crossover from my ‘sex’ thread.)

    Me: Now, we may not be able to say why it (pentadactyly) started as 5 (digits)

    Phoodoo: You meant you can’t explain that?Other than it was?

    I haven’t gone into it. I don’t know everything. I would hypothesise that it’s a frozen accident, and could have been some other number (but probably not 1 or a million). But I don’t need to know that to explain its presence in all of descendant Tetrapoda. That’s Common Descent. Anybody proposing an alternative Common Design explanation needs to offer an explanation for as many instances of pentadactyly as there are separate origins. Or shrug, that seems to work too.

    I think we have different ideas of what an explanation is.

    Clearly.

  6. I will make an app that notes how many minutes it has been since ‘evolution’ appeared in a comment or OP at UD.

    For a blog that is supposed to be about ID their fixation on evolution is rather telling.

    In a similar way even when given the opportunity to discuss the Intelligent Design explanations for, well, anything all all, the thread instantly is populated with critiques of what they think is wrong anyway rather then support for what they think is right.

  7. OMagain:

    So your curiosity is non-existent when it comes to ID, but where evolution is concerned no explanation can ever be detailed enough.

    Double standards much?

    Well put.

  8. phoodoo: I didn’t first have a belief and then found evidence to reinforce it. Exactly the opposite. I read Dawkins, and Neil Shubin and people like this, and started thinking, wait a second THIS is the foundations of belief in evolution? This is what you have?

    phoodoo literally just said this in a different thread.

    So, phoodoo, you evidently have a belief that Intelligent Design explains sex better then evolution can. This can be inferred from your statement above.

    Your belief that ID can explain sex is based on evidence, right?

    So all you have to do is detail that evidence. Then your claim that you don’t have beliefs first and then find evidence to support it will be shown to be true.

    If you can’t detail that evidence, then it seems that you are guilty of what you accuse others of. You believe in Intelligent Design, that it explains sex but without any evidence.

    All you need to do is detail that evidence to demonstrate that you are not a hypocrite. Demonstrate that you come to your beliefs via the evidence and not the other way round.

    Dare you.

  9. phoodoo,
    Sal and Behe have admitted that their mechanism for Intelligent Design is ‘poof’.

    WIll you join them? Or will you continue to critique evolutionary explanations while being afraid to admit that ‘think-poof’ is your alternative?

  10. Allan Miller: But I don’t need to know that to explain its presence in all of descendant Tetrapoda.

    When evolutionist start falling back on the “I don’t know the mechanism, but its common descent” mantra, and then begin to criticize ID, I think to myself, don’t they realize that most IDists also accept some level of common descent?

    So, you haven’t offered MORE of an explanation than ID. The evolutionists explanation is that it was an accident. The IDists is that it wasn’t an accident. When we see incredible functionality in such features, the accident crowd trying to claim some superiority over the designed crowd, is pretty vacuous.

  11. OMagain: you evidently have a belief that Intelligent Design explains sex better then evolution can.

    Better than “accident that worked?”

    You set the bar so low.

    Because marshmallows are spongy is as good as accidents that worked.

  12. Alan Fox: We can set the bar at zero.

    That is literally what evolutionists do. It is because it is. That IS zero.

    Why is it is, “because it was designed to be” any less than that?

    I will answer that for you-it isn’t!

  13. phoodoo: When evolutionist start falling back on the “I don’t know the mechanism, but its common descent” mantra, and then begin to criticize ID, I think to myself, don’t they realize that most IDists also accept some level of common descent?

    Your position has never been very clear to me. For clarity: you except common descent, but not universal CD? At what level does it cease to be an explanation? Above the level of Tetrapoda it appears.

  14. phoodoo: Why is it is, “because it was designed to be” any less than that?

    I will answer that for you-it isn’t!

    Absolutely. ID has zero explanations. That’s what I thought.

  15. Corneel,

    Here is my position-if I haven’t said it already.

    Evolutionist harping constantly about IDists no providing an explanation for things, by saying, “well, we said we don’t know”, or “we said its a accident”, does not in the slightest compel me to accept that the ID explanation is worse. And yet that is what all these threads attempt to do.

    Its:
    -Evolution is a fact

    Then how does it happen?

    -We don’t know, do you have a better explanation?

    It was designed

    -Oh, you believe in poof then!

    Compared to what?

    -ID explains nothing

    Hohoho.

    I don’t fall for such silly traps.

  16. Alan Fox: phoodoo: Why is it is, “because it was designed to be” any less than that?

    I will answer that for you-it isn’t!

    Absolutely. ID has zero explanations. That’s what I thought.

    I rest my case Corneel.

  17. phoodoo: When evolutionist start falling back on the “I don’t know the mechanism, but its common descent” mantra, and then begin to criticize ID, I think to myself, don’t they realize that most IDists also accept some level of common descent?

    It would help if they said exactly where the boundaries are – how many origins they propose. Sure, within any clade, you can make the same appeal as evolution – origin unknown, but everything else derived. But your Designer is then making multiple choices. At each origin, a separate ‘choice’ has been made to go for pentadactyly.

    So, you haven’t offered MORE of an explanation than ID.The evolutionists explanation is that it was an accident.The IDists is that it wasn’t an accident. When we see incredible functionality in such features, the accident crowd trying to claim some superiority over the designed crowd, is pretty vacuous.

    So you need separate functional explanations for each origin, to give a pattern indistinguishable from Common Descent. And yet you shrug at what these may be. Your ‘explanation’ is “it’s not an accident, it’s a choice”. On what grounds?

    Let’s try horses. They walk on a single fused toe. Fossils show more separation. What are the rest for?

  18. Of course, if one accepts common descent, at any level, one must then explain the divergence of the clade from that point onwards. It’s not evolution, because that’s well known to be total rubbish, what with all this ‘fitness’ malarkey. It’s something else. So what is it?

  19. phoodoo:
    Allan Miller,

    Oh my Heavens, you are arguing common descent against IDists who believe in common descent.Holy cow.

    Well, IDists are a varied and slippery bunch, so it’s hard to know where any individual places the boundary. They rarely say. So nail your colours to the mast: is there one common origin of pentadactyly, or several? If the latter, where?

  20. Allan Miller: Well, IDists are a varied and slippery bunch

    So you have studied much evolutionary theory in say, Oh I don’t know the last 100 years or so then?

    Settled science you reckon? Ha.

  21. phoodoo: So you have studied much evolutionary theory in say, Oh I don’t know the last 100 years or so then?

    Settled science you reckon?Ha.

    Question-dodging noted.

    You’ve just been criticising science for suppressing dissent, now it’s full of dissent. Make your mind up.

  22. Once we’ve teased out phoodoo’s origin point for pentadactyly, we can move on to sex. It appears to be a synapomorphy – commonly descended – in eukaryotes. Is it?

  23. Allan Miller,

    Continually being wrong, does not equal dissent.

    Geneticists have been wrong about inheritance for as long as we have known the concept of inheritance. And no matter how wrong they have been, the evolutionist will still say, Yea, ok, but still…

    It is hard to imagine a discovery in genetics that would cause evolutionist to admit they have to start over. They only thing (think) they know is, well, its common descent. Next new discovery, well, still common descent, right, let’s agree. Oh, and not designed, its purposeless, right. let’s all agree!

    Oops, we were UTTERLY AND TOTALLY wrong about how DNA works. But still, common, not designed, purposeless, let’s repeat, everyone “Common, purposeless, not designed!”

    “But, I would like to point out, not exactly purposeless…” “Ok,ok, Benton, we got it, save it!”

    “Common, purposeless, not designed! Common, purposeless, not designed….”

    “Everything you know about genetics is wrong”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNER3M20WnU

  24. phoodoo: Geneticists have been wrong about inheritance for as long as we have known the concept of inheritance. And no matter how wrong they have been, the evolutionist will still say, Yea, ok, but still…

    We have? How so?

  25. phoodoo: “Everything you know about genetics is wrong”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNER3M20WnU

    That’s a rather good talk. Rutherford is making the point that journalists mangle genetics far worse than any other field. The “you” of his title are the readers of articles in the lay press.
    He heaps particular scorn on the “scientists discover the gene for XXXX” headlines.
    I encourage the IDists here to listen to the whole lecture and try to understand his point. He also puts epigenetics in its rightful place in the Q&A.
    phoodoo, every time that you make some wisecrack about “the gene for x”, you are NOT lampooning evolutionary thinking, you are instead displaying your profound ignorance.

  26. phoodoo,

    Geneticists have been wrong about inheritance for as long as we have known the concept of inheritance.

    Who’s put them straight? Non-geneticists?

    You know Rutherford’s a geneticist? My son bought me his book for Christmas, incidentally. I hope I’m not going to learn anything from it.

  27. phoodoo:
    Allan Miller,

    Continually being wrong, does not equal dissent.

    No, but disagreeing does.

    “Settled science you reckon?” implied disagreement, not consensual wrongness.

  28. phoodoo: Oops, we were UTTERLY AND TOTALLY wrong about how DNA works. But still, common, not designed, purposeless, let’s repeat, everyone “Common, purposeless, not designed!”

    If you want to make a case for a designer based on DNA, sure, go for it. But others have made that case and, so far, it’s not persuaded all that many actual scientists.

    And as others have noted it’s scientists getting it wrong in the first place, and scientists correcting them. Nobody in the process needs to declare ‘not designed’ as it’s simply not on the radar as there’s no actual evidence nor requirement for a designer, beyond your foot stompings.

    phoodoo: “Common, purposeless, not designed! Common, purposeless, not designed….”

    “Everything you know about genetics is wrong”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNER3M20WnU

    It’s interesting the way you juxtapose that statement and that link. As it turns out, there’s one thing we do know about genetics that’s not wrong, at least not according to that video. It’s not Intelligently Designed. It’s purposeless, in the sense you mean it.

    Nothing in that video says otherwise. So not everything we know about genetics – no intelligent designer needed, is wrong after all.

    Your attempt to manufacture evidence for your claims is noted.

  29. It’s like a guy with a gut who’s not run since high school critiquing the form of an olympic athlete.

    phoodoo: It is hard to imagine a discovery in genetics that would cause evolutionist to admit they have to start over.

    Your grasp of science seems strange. It’s not about ‘admitting’ anything. If I can demonstrate my claim and you cannot demonstrate why my claim is in error then I have made my case. Science advances a notch.

    What, do you think peer review is forcing people to admit you might be right based on something other then the evidence you have presented.

    Very very strange.

  30. phoodoo: It is hard to imagine a discovery in genetics that would cause evolutionist to admit they have to start over. They only thing (think) they know is, well, its common descent. Next new discovery, well, still common descent, right, let’s agree. Oh, and not designed, its purposeless, right. let’s all agree!

    Topic of the thread is the Intelligent Design explanation for sex. Perhaps the discovery you are thinking of is the one that might be made were you to spend some time pondering the topic instead of reflectively critiquing the thing you already know is wrong.

    Logically speaking, advancing ID would be the thing to spend your efforts on, now that you have defeated evilutionism, no? So why continue to beat this dead horse phoodoo? Why not spend your precious minutes in.a room with J-Mac and colewd creating papers no journal would dare to reject?

    It makes no sense. And as Judge Judy is wont to say….

  31. phoodoo:
    Allan Miller,
    It is hard to imagine a discovery in genetics that would cause evolutionist to admit they have to start over.

    True, but that’s the hallmark of something being fundamentally correct, as well as of something adhered to by the perennially obtuse.

    They only thing (think) they know is, well, its common descent.Next new discovery, well, still common descent, right, let’s agree.Oh, and not designed, its purposeless, right.let’s all agree!

    For an “IDist who accepts common descent”, you seem a bit pissed off by it.

    Oops, we were UTTERLY AND TOTALLY wrong about how DNA works.But still, common, not designed, purposeless, let’s repeat, everyone “Common, purposeless, not designed!”

    Discovering the way DNA works gave us shedloads of confirmatory data on common descent undreamt of by Darwin. ‘Purpose’ is neither here nor there. ‘Cos, after all, we can’t know the Mind of the Designer, right?

  32. One hears — not firsthand accounts, mind you — that there is no sex in heaven.

    The logical conclusion is that sex is not particularly important to the life of the soul.

    Assuming the afterlife lasts longer than life.

    Your religion may differ.

  33. It should be perfectly clear to all that the ID position on sex is simply this: since sex has a purpose, it is vastly more likely to be the result of intelligent design than of evolution. But since intelligent design cannot specify the causal processes whereby what is designed comes into existence, it cannot tell us how sex came to be.

    It should be perfectly clear, as well, that ID could specify the causal processes whereby designs are materially instantiated only by positing something about the capacities and incapacities of the designer. But since ID forbids itself from doing so, it cannot say anything about the causal process of design implementation.

    This is why every “argument for ID” is only an argument against the likelihood of generating functional structures through non-intentional processes. There is nothing else to the position besides that — and more importantly, there cannot be. ID is constitutively and structurally incapable of providing a testable alternative to evolutionary theory. And that’s why everything we here from ID advocates is always and only about criticizing evolution, and never about proposing a testable alternative to it.

  34. Kantian Naturalist,

    It should be perfectly clear to all that the ID position on sex is simply this: since sex has a purpose, it is vastly more likely to be the result of intelligent design than of evolution. 

    I could buy that – as far as it went – if someone could give an answer as to what that ‘purpose’ might be. Then, Design would parallel extreme adaptationism: the result of selection is indistinguishable (on a cursory glance) from the result of design. But part of the ongoing difficulty of sex is that it does not permit simple adaptationist explanations, and therefore, Design explanations fail too.

    What I attempted to do in my piece is invoke the role of contingency, co-opted systems and side-effect in the overall picture. That’s available to evolutionary explanations (though not the strawman cartoon that sees everything as down to Natural Selection). It’s not so much available to Design, if they need to see ‘purpose’.

  35. Allan Miller,

    I could buy that – as far as it went – if someone could give an answer as to what that ‘purpose’ might be. Then, Design would parallel extreme adaptationism: the result of selection is indistinguishable (on a cursory glance) from the result of design. But part of the ongoing difficulty of sex is that it does not permit simple adaptationist explanations, and therefore, Design explanations fail too.

    What design or mind does is solve the chicken and egg problems in biology of which reproduction is and example of as it is part of the original definition. Without reproduction life would not exist.

  36. colewd: What design or mind does is solve the chicken and egg problems in biology of which reproduction is and example of as it is part of the original definition. Without reproduction life would not exist.

    Then the designer is not alive?

  37. colewd: What design or mind does is solve the chicken and egg problems in biology of which reproduction is

    Wrong again Bill. Proposing a disembodied mind using magic doesn’t solve anything. It’s unsupported ad hoc nonsense, the same as you always offer.

  38. “A thread for ID proponents to explain their alternative theory for biological phenomena.”

    When I first read this, I thought it was a joke…
    Unfortunately, I was wrong…

    But, here we go:

    “OK, you ID types, what’s the Design explanation for sex? You need to explain why all eukaryotes have genes that are involved in meiosis, though some never actually perform meiosis, and in some, the genes are ‘broken’. And you need to explain the taxonomic distribution of asexuality – absent in mammals and birds, but increasingly found as one descends your imagined scala naturae – though intermittent sex remains the norm, even in single celled organisms.”

    https://youtu.be/FVhdJQP2GmI

    This imbecilic, brainless, absurd, utterly idiotic, totally preposterous and, most of all, loaded question should be featured for as long as TSZ exist, as the example of to what extent Darwinists will go in order to defend their baseless worldview…

  39. colewd: What design or mind does is solve the chicken and egg problems in biology of which reproduction is and example of as it is part of the original definition. Without reproduction life would not exist.

    We are not discussing reproduction. We are discussing sex: recombination of genetic material, or syngamy with meiosis. Life can exist without sex, so what is the Designer’s purpose for those things?

  40. J-Mac: This imbecilic, brainless, absurd, utterly idiotic, totally preposterous and, most of all, loaded question should be featured for as long as TSZ exist, as the example of to what extent Darwinists will go in order to defend their baseless worldview…

    J-Mac doesn’t know either.

  41. J-Mac: This imbecilic, brainless, absurd, utterly idiotic, totally preposterous and, most of all, loaded question should be featured for as long as TSZ exist, as the example of to what extent Darwinists will go in order to defend their baseless worldview…

    That’s an awfully long winded way to say ID has no clue as to why sex was “designed”.

  42. colewd:
    Allan Miller,

    What design or mind does is solve the chicken and egg problems in biology of which reproduction is and example of as it is part of the original definition.Without reproduction life would not exist.

    Without replication life would not exist. There is no fundamental need for sex the way eukaryotes do it. Prokaryotes do without it (some people talk of bacterial ‘sex’, but that is very different), and so do many eukaryotes.

    Anyway, I’ve solved the chicken-and-egg problem, so no need for Design. (I’m joking, though only slightly).

  43. J-Mac: This imbecilic, brainless, absurd, utterly idiotic,totally preposterous and,most of all, loaded question should be featured for as long as TSZ exist, as the example of to what extent Darwinists will go in order to defend their baseless worldview…

    Your inability to go within a mile of addressing the questions and the data, either under my OP or the reverse challenge, is also a monument to … something. There’s a bunch of facts that (to the intellectually curious) seem to demand an explanation. Then, there’s you.

  44. I’ve mentioned this before, but all my musings kicked off with a Creationist saying “I’d like to see an evolutionist explain sex…”. Rather than call the question imbecilic etc, I had a go. I like a puzzle.

Leave a Reply