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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (256935)	10/24/2005 1:44:52 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574851

"So is the idea of sending a tornado through a junkyard and ending up with a car." You keep saying that. But it in no way, shape or form comes even close to proposed mechanisms for evolution. What drives evolution are the little individual variations that come about through sexual recombination of characteristics and even mutations. All of which show up in the individual variation that we see in everyone around us. It is almost impossible for a mutation to have great effect. Mutations that make big changes are almost always fatal. Even those that aren't promptly fatal, often have long term negative effects. There are some that are out there, usually wind up being retained because they don't kill too quickly or are only fatal when homozygous(inherited from both parents as opposed to one). Some excellent examples are sickle cell anemia which confers resistance to malaria and Tay-Sachs, which confers resistance to TB. Both are ok when heterozygous(gene from one parent), but are nasty when homozygous. There are more. Another good example is Type I diabetes(juvenile diabetes). People who have this are much more resistant to long term starvation effects. Because food supply, especially for the young, was an iffy thing through much of human history, this gene is still in the population. ID, though, isn't science. For one, it isn't falsifiable. There just isn't any way to nail it down in a testable way. Sure, you can point at certain things like the flagella and say there isn't any way that it could have existed in intermediate forms. But 25 years ago, birds were in the same boat. There was no way that competitive, intermediate forms could have existed. That is, there wasn't any way until we discovered those Chinese fossils which show that there was, indeed, ways intermediate forms could and did exist. In fact, bird evolution is a clear and logical progression now. The key was the realization that many dinosaurs, especially the theropods, were feathered. Admittedly, the idea of a brightly feathered T. Rex is sort of giggle worthy unless it happens to be looming over you, but at least the younger ones did have feathers and there isn't any real reason to put restrictions on colors. Feathered young dinosaurs started getting mindshare when scientists realized that dinosaurs, particularly young dinos, grew very fast. To pack on a ton or more in a year's time meant a high metabolism rate, and that requires body heat. One of many salient qualities of feathers is insulation... Oh yeah, and feathers aren't just modified scale. Totally different development process. They do development similarly to hair. Another reason why ID isn't science is that it fails Occam's Razor. It just doesn't add anything to a scientific discussion. Whether or not something exists because it was designed that way or evolved that way through purely natural forces makes no difference at all to the scientific point of view, however much it may mean in a personal sense. The designed organism that arrives at its form by having the hand of some unspecified designed is going to take the same steps as one that arrived there by natural forces. True, the designer might have made less steps, but it might not have. You can't quantify that at all. So hypothesizing a designer just complicates the theory without adding anything. So the Razor snips it off.