Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

The Guardian,for the benefit of American readers,is written by a bunch of left-wing,feminist,floppy, bow tied, pinko beardies whose wives make them share the housework and who can't wait to get their paws on to advertising revenue for what will be popular when drink,smokes,loose women and bawdy sing-songs have been banned due to their irrationality.

"After being reviled for more than 2000 years as the embodiment of treachery, Judas Iscariot's side of the story was finally published yesterday. Thanks to a newly discovered gospel in Judas's name, we know what his excuse was: Jesus made me do it."

rosborne979 wrote:

Quote:

"Evolution is not an assumption - it's a fact of science," he said in an interview. "If someone was writing a proposal to investigate how people think about gravity, the researcher would not have to justify gravitation theory in the proposal."

Exactly. How much more clear can anyone make it.

Well, it is clear that gravity is easily demonstrated and observed. But evolution is not. So the analogy blows up

Hi, Glamour Gams - doin' fine here, all things considered - trust it ain't much different with you and Bernie. Remind me to tell you guys about the ladder, the stupidity, and the big, heavy, incredibly inconvenient, depressingly long-lasting plaster cast.

Evolution of Hormone-Receptor Complexity by Molecular Exploitation
(Jamie T. Bridgham, Sean M. Carroll, Joseph W. Thornton*)

According to Darwinian theory, complexity evolves by a stepwise process of elaboration and optimization under natural selection. Biological systems composed of tightly integrated parts seem to challenge this view, because it is not obvious how any element's function can be selected for unless the partners with which it interacts are already present. Here we demonstrate how an integrated molecular system?-the specific functional interaction between the steroid hormone aldosterone and its partner the mineralocorticoid receptor?-evolved by a stepwise Darwinian process. Using ancestral gene resurrection, we show that, long before the hormone evolved, the receptor's affinity for aldosterone was present as a structural by-product of its partnership with chemically similar, more ancient ligands. Introducing two amino acid changes into the ancestral sequence recapitulates the evolution of present-day receptor specificity. Our results indicate that tight interactions can evolve by molecular exploitation?-recruitment of an older molecule, previously constrained for a different role, into a new functional complex.

*Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA.

Battle of time, luck and science
(Professor Colin Blakemore, Times Online, April 9, 2006)

Anyone doubtful about Darwin should do a little homework on flu. There is no intelligent design in a virus ?- only the mindless force of natural selection.

Darwin realised that random errors in reproduction will automatically ensure successive generations become adapted to their environments. Viruses are the speeded up version of evolution ?- the whole process is happening before our eyes.

The fact that flu is caused by a virus was a British discovery, made in 1933 by scientists of the Medical Research Council (MRC). The MRC still plays a central role in the global fight against flu.

Its National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, north London, houses the World Health Organisation's World Influenza Centre, the hub of a network of laboratories that analyses virus samples from around the world, following the evolution of new strains. Their advice guides the production of vaccines.

The swan washed up on a beach in Fife is just the latest story in the evolution of flu. We now know it was infected with the dreaded H5N1 virus, raising fear of a deadly pandemic.

We are reminded of the Spanish flu of 1918, the most devastating plague in history. One billion people, half the world's population, were infected; one in 20 died.

Sir John Skehel, the director of the MRC institute at Mill Hill, analysed the structure of the 1918 virus and found it was a bird virus that had changed to enable it to transmit readily from person to person.

The crucial step that triggers a pandemic is probably a process known as reassortment, which could occur in an animal infected with two different strains of flu. The genes of the two viruses could combine to create a novel virus with the ability to spread easily from person to person. This might occur in a person, or any species that can catch both bird flu and human flu, perhaps a pig, a cat or a ferret.

How worried should we be? Given the historical record, we can be sure there will be flu pandemics in the future. But we must get the threat into perspective. H5N1 has been in circulation for nearly 10 years without the crucial change. It is currently a disease of birds.

H5N1 has infected almost 200 people in southeast Asia and Turkey and more than half of them died. But, so far, virtually all cases seem to have occurred in people in very close contact with heavily infected poultry.

Wild ducks are playing a sinister role in the evolution of H5N1. They can be infected with H5N1 and spread the virus to other birds but do not develop symptoms or die. This means H5N1 is likely to circulate for years to come.

Threat is the engine of innovation. Medical agencies are researching how H5N1 affects the body, how it spreads, and how to develop new anti-viral drugs ?- for poultry as well as humans. But research will take time. We have to hope evolution will be kind to us and that containment will buy us that time. The future holds a competition between time, chance and science.

spendi. Im sure theres a deep thought in there somewhere, I just dont have the time or interest to excavate. Somehow your now into Mailer, good fer you. Im sure were going to be reading a ton of phrenetic "cluster posts" with ole Norm as the center.

spendi. Im sure theres a deep thought in there somewhere, I just dont have the time or interest to excavate.

spendi. Im sure theres a deep thought in there somewhere, I just dont have the time or interest to excavate.

Time to Give It Up
(by Britt Peterson, Seed, April 10, 2006)

Lehigh biochemistry professor Michael Behe and his cronies in the intelligent design community have attempted to poke holes in evolutionary theory using an idea dubbed "irreducible complexity"?-the notion that complex systems with interdependent parts could not have evolved through Darwinian trial and error and must be the work of a creator, since the absence of any single part makes the whole system void. However, a paper published in the April 7th issue of Science provides the first experimental proof that "irreducible complexity" is a misnomer, and that even the most complex systems come into being through Darwinian natural selection.

"We weren't motivated by irreducible complexity," said Joe Thornton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the paper. "How complexity evolved is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology per se, and it's once we saw our results that we realized the implications for the social debate."

Thornton's team has been studying one example of a complex system in which each part defines the function of the other: the partnerships between hormones and the proteins on cell walls, or receptors, that bind them. The researchers looked specifically at the hormone aldosterone, which controls behavior and kidney function, and its receptor.

"[This pairing] is a great model for the problem of the evolution of complexity," said Thornton. "How do these multi-part systems where the function of one part depends on the other part? How do those systems evolve?"

Thornton and his co-investigators used computational methods to deduce the gene structure of a long-gone ancestor of aldosterone's receptor. They then synthesized the receptor in the lab. After recovering the ancient receptor?-which they estimate to be a 450-million-year-old receptor that would have been present in the ancestor of all jawed vertebrates?-Thornton's team tested modern day hormones that would activate it. Although aldosterone did not evolve until many millions of years after the extinction of the ancient hormone receptor, Thornton found that it and the ancient receptor were compatible.

This cross-generational partnership is made possible, Thornton explained, by the similarity in form between aldosterone and the ancient hormone that once partnered with the receptor.

"The story is basically that a new hormone evolved later and exploited a receptor that had a different function previously to take part in a new partnership," said Thornton.

The principal at work in the evolution of complex systems is molecular exploitation: when an individual component casts around for other materials that might work together with it, even though those elements might have evolved as parts of other systems.

"Evolution assembles these complex systems by exploiting parts that are already present for other purposes, drawing them into new complexes and giving them new functions through very subtle changes in their sequences and in their structures," Thornton said.

While the mutually dependent parts do not evolve to be perfectly complementary to one another, after molecular exploitation, they cleave together and create an illusion of irreducible complexity.

"Such studies solidly refute all parts of the intelligent design argument," wrote Christoph Adami, of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, in an introduction to the Science paper. "Those 'alternate' ideas, unlike the hypotheses investigated in these papers, remain thoroughly untested. Consequently, whatever debate remains must be characterized as purely political."

wandel, thanks for finding and posting these many articles. Ive been impressed at your span of the various source material . This post would be quite appropriate over on the thread "ID is so not Creationism" that a new member, "Teleologist" had begun.

Consequently, whatever debate remains must be characterized as purely political."

Aldosterone is a hormone released by the adrenal glands. It is part of the complex mechanism used by the body to regulate blood pressure.