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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (97480)	3/10/2005 11:28:10 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

Re intelligent design vs creation science - I'll quote Behe on that: "Many people think that questioning Darwinian evolution must be equivalent to espousing creationism. As commonly understood, creationism involves belief in an earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an interopretation of the Bitle that is still ver popular. For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms withan an evolutionary framewlrk, and I think that evolutionary viologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world. Althoufh Darwin's medanism - matural selection working on variation - might explain many things, however, I do no believe it explains molecular life." p.5 Darwin's Black Box There are numerous distinguished skeptics of Darwinism's ability to explain molecular life. One is Lynn Margulis, Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts, who says "history will ultimately judge neo-Darwinism as a "minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology." At one of her many public talks she asks the molecular biologists in the audience to name a single, unambiguous example of the formation of a new species by the accumulation of mutations. Her challenge goes unmet." Page 26 Darwin's Black Box (Note - Margulis is not an intelligent design theorist, but proposes her own alternative to Darwinism, symbiogenesis, and is a supporter of the Gaia theory.) From my readings, it looks like Darwinian evolution has serious problems as a theory. But it's up in the air as to what will replace it. Clearly ID is a strong contender. Behe discusses the numerous complicated biochemical structures and processes that are what he refers to as "irreducibly complex". That is they are made up of numerous sub-structures and chemical reactions, all* of which must be present at once for the overall structure or process to work. So the structure couldn't have come about piecemeal gradually over a long period. Some of the examples are the living cell itself, the immune system, the blood coagulation system, cellular protein transport system, and the bacterial flagellar rotary motor. ** Hemophilia is an example of what happens if one of the chemical substances involved in controlling blood coagulation is missing. Clearly blood coagulation is a process where each step the cascade of biochemical reactions which cause and control clotting must work right lest the organism bleed to death on the one hand or clot the whole organism's blood supply on the other. *Motor is not a figure of speech, certain bacteria actually move via tiny motors embedded in their cell walls, something I didn't know but find pretty neat. We all know that if we were exploring a new planet and found a machine, a clock or dune buggy, say, we'd recognize that as not something produced by nature but the result of some intelligence. So what are you supposed to think when you find out there's a motor in a single-celled bacteria? This too big of a topic for me to deal with at once in one post so I'll be following up with other posts dealing with related matters on future evenings.