Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

You're wasting your time with Godwin here.

people (around here, that is) are so rarely nice to me.

You either ignore it or give an only slightly more sophisticated version of Set's 'Don't pedal your BS here'. Never have you given a direct reply to the issues raised in my arguments.

Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2007 Dec;38(4):807-19. Epub 2007 Nov 19.

Bacteria are small but not stupid: cognition, natural genetic engineering and socio-bacteriology.

Forty years' experience as a bacterial geneticist has taught me that bacteria possess many cognitive, computational and evolutionary capabilities unimaginable in the first six decades of the twentieth century...bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus.

Contemporary research in many laboratories on cell-cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis show that bacteria utilise sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of 'higher' plants and animals to meet their own needs. This remarkable series of observations requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognise that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.

James Alan Shapiro is an American biologist, an expert in bacterial genetics and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago.

Natural genetic engineering (NGE) is a class of process proposed by molecular biologist James Shapiro to account for novelty created in the course of biological evolution. Shapiro developed this work in several peer-reviewed publications and later in his book Evolution: A View from the 21st Century.

Natural genetic engineering is a reaction against the modern synthesis and the central dogma of molecular biology. The modern synthesis was formulated before the elucidation of the double-helix structure of DNA and the establishment of molecular biology in its current status of prominence. Given what was known at the time a simple, powerful model of genetic change through undirected mutation (loosely described as "random") and natural selection, was seen as sufficient to explain evolution as observed in nature.

Within the context of the article in particular and Shapiro's work on Natural Genetic Engineering in general, the "guiding intelligence" is to be found within the cell. (For example, in a Huffington Post essay entitled Cell Cognition and Cell Decision-Making...

Natural genetic engineering has been cited as a legitimate scientific controversy (in contrast to the controversies raised by various branches of creationism).[12] While Shapiro considers the questions raised by Intelligent Design to be interesting, he parts ways with creationists by considering these problems to be scientifically tractable (specifically by understanding how NGE plays a role in the evolution of novelty).

However, the combination of disagreement with the Modern Synthesis and discussion of a creative intelligence has brought his work to the attention of advocates of Intelligent Design, despite Shapiro's explicit repudiation of that movement.

However, the combination of disagreement with the Modern Synthesis and discussion of a creative intelligence has brought his work to the attention of advocates of Intelligent Design, despite Shapiro's explicit repudiation of that movement.

Its a long discussion about what has been said by several (in cluding Gould) who have made the distinction that "apparent design" is a reflction of how limited the reactions and linkages of organic components of life are.

Modern evolutionary theory has a way to incorporate, field check, and adapt and "fold in" what appear to be contentious disagreements. Thats the neat thing. When guys like you and Lamont "cherry pick" to make it sound like what its not, well you do yourselves no service.

Maybe The Tinkerer's Assistant will be more to your liking

Turner proposes that modern evolutionary theory over-emphasizes genetic natural selection and a tendency to separate information from catalysis at the molecular level. By connecting information and catalysis, epigenesis coupled with homeostasis exemplifies the internal, directive capacities of the organism, linking information and behavior. Turner has also suggested that termite mounds exemplify collective intelligence via a form of swarm cognition that is a model for the emergence of cognitive systems in a variety of contexts, including, but not limited to, self-contained nervous systems.

Evolutionary biology is dominated by study of the genotype-population genetics, quantitative genetics and most recently a tsunami of molecular genetics. Progress in understanding the nitty-gritty of gene structure and function has been extraordinary...What does our vast knowledge of the genotype tell us, 141 years later, about how organisms change form through time? Not much. So why is it we still know so little about how organisms evolve?

The problem is physics envy. In physics, fundamental insights have been attained through reductionism -- the ability to explain complex phenomena by reference to elemental processes. Many biologists, seduced by this example, persist in believing that the complexity of whole-organism evolution can be similarly understood....the touted key to phenotypic evolution never materialized. This failure can probably be attributed to the pesky problem of ''emergence....The key to the evolution of organisms is therefore not to be found in the genotype, the phenotype or the environment; it is in the integration of all, the biology of holism.