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Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

 
 
spendius
 
  1  
Wed 9 Apr, 2008 05:19 pm
TCR-

Whereabouts are you just now. If I need help it is no good if I don't know where you are.

Send me your space/time co-ordinates. It could be a matter of life or death.

It struck me in the pub that when Captain Kirk said "Beam me up Scottie" that Scottie was a bit pedantic beaming him up into a glass tube rather than stuck up one of those "technical assistants".
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Wed 9 Apr, 2008 05:38 pm
Settin' Aah-aah--

You need a sharp darning needle to get the last bit of sustenance from the bottom of the barrel and fingers that can clutch at straws.

real life is long gone.

Have you no holiday snaps you can put on?

Your desire, a funny word is desire, to go back to rl is touching. Does it comfort you? Make you feel all scientific and all?
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Wed 9 Apr, 2008 05:41 pm
I've had a stare at your avvie mesquite.

I think I like it.
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mesquite
 
  1  
Wed 9 Apr, 2008 07:23 pm
I'm glad that you like it spendius. Not bad for a heathen eh?
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farmerman
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 05:55 am
In an effort to present the other sides views. Heres an article about ID research as published in NEW SCIENTIST
Quote:
Intelligent Design Research Lab Highlighted in New Scientist
An article in the latest issue of New Scientist highlights the exciting work of scientists at the Biologic Institute, a new research lab conducting biological research and experiments from an intelligent design perspective. While writer Celeste Biever can't suppress her visceral pro-Darwin bias from the story (which carries the dismissive title "Intelligent design: The God Lab"), Biever's article is going to make it very difficult for Darwinists to continue to assert that scientists who support intelligent design aren't conducting scientific research.

As Biever's article grudgingly makes clear, "researchers [at the Biologic Institute lab] work at benches lined with fume hoods, incubators and microscopes--a typical scene in this up-and-coming biotech hub." The article also reports on some of the research projects underway, and even describes Darwinian biologist Ken Miller as conceding that the topics being explored "are of interest to science":


According to [Biologic Institute senior researcher Dr. Douglas] Axe, the projects currently under way at Biologic include "examining the origin of metabolic pathways in bacteria, the evolution of gene order in bacteria, and the evolution of protein folds."
Certainly the topics Axe mentions are of interest to science, says Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who testified as an expert witness for the pro-evolution side at the Dover trial. Miller adds that they might be of particular interest to people intent on undermining evolution if, like Axe's earlier work on protein folding, they can be used to highlight structures and functions whose origins and evolution are not well understood.

In addition to protein and cell biology, Biologic is pursuing a programme in computational biology which draws on the expertise of another of its researchers, Brendan Dixon, a former software developer at Microsoft. According to Axe, "On the computational side, we are nearing completion of a system for exploring the evolution of artificial genes that are considerably more life-like than has been the case previously."


Biever's breathless, conspiratorial prose can't hide the fact that researchers at the new Institute are serious scientists with impressive research records. For example, the article notes that the Institute's senior scientist, protein researcher Douglas Axe, has published peer-reviewed research articles in the Journal of Molecular Biology and previously worked "as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Protein Engineering, a research centre in Cambridge, UK, funded by the Medical Research Council, under the supervision of protein specialist Alan Fersht of the University of Cambridge." In addition, Dr. Axe has worked "as a visiting scientist at the structural biology unit of the Babraham Institute, also in Cambridge."

Biologic Institute biologist Ann Gauger has a similarly sterling track record. Dr. Gauger has published peer-reviewed research "on cell adhesion in fruit flies" in Nature, one of the world's premiere science journals, as well as publishing "papers as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University."

It is worth noting that Biever acknowledges that Discovery Institute has been providing funding for scientific research, including start-up support for the Biologic Institute. While Biever tries to insinuate that this commitment to funding scientific research is somehow a "new" development tied to recent policy debates, the facts cited in her article undermine that claim. Indeed, Biever herself notes that Discovery Institute was providing research funding for Dr. Axe by the late 1990s, which ultimately resulted in the publication of his peer-reviewed research articles in the Journal of Molecular Biology. Yes, that's right--Discovery Institute has been supporting scientific research and writing all along, just like it has said. But don't hold your breath for corrections or apologies from the Darwin spinmeisters who have insisted otherwise for the past decade
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spendius
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 06:42 am
Crikey!! ID-iots publishing in the Journal of Molecular Biology and in Nature, one of the world's premiere science journals, as well as publishing postdoctoral papers at Harvard.

Amazing.

But there are two interesting phrases in the piece-

Quote:
visceral pro-Darwin bias


and

Quote:
breathless, conspiratorial prose


I think we might be getting emotional but we are used to that on here where visceral, breathless, conspiratorial prose is featured on a daily basis.

There's a song by Dream Theater -A Fortune in Lies, which is admittedly pretty ghastly but does touch upon the psychosomatic effect of the scent of ready cash and some conditioned reflex sensations unconsciously resulting.

Be careful fm- you can get unpopular going all scientific.
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TheCorrectResponse
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 06:46 am
Sorry I missed you spendi but I had some work to do. I doubt if my coordinates are contained in your reality so consider me here virtually.

P.S. Isn't this nicer, having people acknowledge your existence I mean. It must be hard to drown out those voices in your head when you are only posting to yourself.

P.S.S. Sorry you can't tell from my posts but He/She/ or It you still ain't gettin' any. Not like you haven't heard that line a million times before.

So, as always, I'm here for you buddy; fell better.
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 06:52 am
mesquite wrote-

Quote:
Not bad for a heathen eh?


Claiming to be a heathen is easy but it don't make you one.
0 Replies
 
wandeljw
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 08:52 am
farmerman wrote:
In an effort to present the other sides views. Heres an article about ID research as published in NEW SCIENTIST
Quote:
Intelligent Design Research Lab Highlighted in New Scientist
An article in the latest issue of New Scientist highlights the exciting work of scientists at the Biologic Institute, a new research lab conducting biological research and experiments from an intelligent design perspective.


This is the actual article:

Quote:
Intelligent design: The God Lab
(Celeste Biever, New Scientist Magazine, 15 December 2006)

Pay a visit to the Biologic Institute and you are liable to get a chilly reception. "We only see people with appointments," states the man who finally responds to my persistent knocks. Then he slams the door on me.

I am standing on the ground floor of an office building in Redmond, Washington, the Seattle suburb best known as home town to Microsoft. What I'm trying to find out is whether the 1-year-old institute is the new face of another industry that has sprung up in the area - the one that has set out to try to prove evolution is wrong.

This is my second attempt to engage in person with scientists at Biologic. At the institute's other facility in nearby Fremont, researchers work at benches lined with fume hoods, incubators and microscopes - a typical scene in this up-and-coming biotech hub. Most of them there proved just as reluctant to speak with a New Scientist reporter.

The reticence cloaks an unorthodox agenda. "We are the first ones doing what we might call lab science in intelligent design," says George Weber, the only one of Biologic's four directors who would speak openly with me. "The objective is to challenge the scientific community on naturalism." Weber is not a scientist but a retired professor of business and administration at the Presbyterian Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. He heads the Spokane chapter of Reasonstobelieve.org, a Christian organisation that seeks to challenge Darwinism.

The anti-evolution movement's latest response to Darwin is intelligent design (ID). Its fundamental premise is that certain features of living organisms are too complex to have evolved without the direct intervention of an intelligent designer. In ID literature that designer remains cautiously anonymous, but for many proponents he corresponds closely with the God of the Christian Bible. Over the past few years the movement's media-savvy public face has been the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which has championed intelligent design, claiming it to be a legitimate scientific theory, and supported its key architects. It was Discovery that provided the funding to get the Biologic Institute up and running.

Last week I learned that following his communication with New Scientist, Weber has left the board of the Biologic Institute. Douglas Axe, the lab's senior researcher and spokesman, told me in an email that Weber "was found to have seriously misunderstood the purpose of Biologic and to have misrepresented it". Axe's portrayal of the Biologic Institute's purpose excludes religious connotation. He says that the lab's main objective "is to show that the design perspective can lead to better science", although he allows that the Biologic Institute will "contribute substantially to the scientific case for intelligent design".

This science-first message suggests that the developing anti-evolution movement in the US has moved on to a new stage - one in which opponents of evolutionary biology, trained as research scientists, take to the lab in search of the creator's handiwork. In light of recent events, it also makes sense as a public relations strategy.

ID was dealt a significant blow when parents in the Dover school district of Pennsylvania successfully challenged the right of school board officials to introduce pro-ID material into high school biology classrooms. In December 2005, US federal court judge John Jones ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach ID in public schools because it would violate the separation of church and state as laid out in the First Amendment (New Scientist, 7 January, p 8).

In addition to its religious undertones, ID had not "been the subject of testing and research", Jones stated, nor had it "generated peer-reviewed publications", and so had no business in science classes. Wary of losing similar court cases, at least four state education boards subsequently rejected or removed ID-friendly language from their high-school curricula, or are expected do so when newly elected members take office next year.

These developments underscored ID's most serious weakness. "The criticism that has been levelled against them most frequently is that they talk about science but they don't do science," says Richard Olmstead, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who has spoken out against the teaching of ID in science classes.

The message is clear. If ID supporters can bolster their case by citing more experimental research, another judge at some future date might conclude that ID does qualify as science, and is therefore a legitimate topic for discussion in American science classrooms. This is precisely the kind of scientific respectability that research at the Biologic Institute is attempting to provide. "We need all the input we can get in the sciences," Weber told me. "What we are doing is necessary to move ID along."

Axe appears to be one of the prime movers in this latest version of the anti-evolution enterprise. In a Discovery Institute strategy paper that was leaked on the internet in 1999, Axe is identified as heading up a molecular biology programme that has the aim of undercutting the scientific basis for evolution. At that time he was funded by the Discovery Institute and working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Protein Engineering, a research centre in Cambridge, UK, funded by the Medical Research Council, under the supervision of protein specialist Alan Fersht of the University of Cambridge.

Fersht says he did not at first know about the Discovery Institute's support for ID. "People do work in labs on external funding. Basically he [Axe] had a fellowship from what I thought was a bona fide research institute," he says. When another researcher in his lab pointed to the Discovery Institute's agenda and suggested that Axe be asked to leave, Fersht refused. "I have always been fairly easy-going about people working in the lab. I said I was not going to throw him out. What he was doing was asking legitimate questions about how a protein folded."

In 2000 Axe published a paper about protein mutations (Journal of Molecular Biology, vol 301, p 585). The paper itself makes no mention of ID, but William Dembski, a philosopher and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, cites it as peer-reviewed evidence for ID (see "Building a case").

By 2002 it was becoming clear that Axe and Fersht were in dispute with each other over the implications of work going on in Fersht's lab. At the time Fersht was preparing to publish a retraction of a paper in which he and three colleagues had claimed to have caused one enzyme to evolve the functionality of another (Nature, vol 403, p 617). Axe interpreted the fact that problems had surfaced with the result as evidence that there were problems with the theory of evolution. "I described to Alan preliminary results of mine that seemed to challenge the ability of spontaneous mutations to produce proteins with fundamentally new structures, and I suggested that the struggling projects under his direction might actually be pointing to the same conclusion," Axe told me in an email. Fersht disagreed with the suggestion. The problem result "didn't show anything of the sort", he says. "It showed there were inadequacies in our knowledge."

In March 2002, Axe left Fersht's lab to work as a visiting scientist at the structural biology unit of the Babraham Institute, also in Cambridge. His work there, again funded by the Discovery Institute, led to the publication of a second paper in 2004 (Journal of Molecular Biology, vol 341, p 1295) that was again cited by ID proponents as evidence in its favour.

Since 2004 Axe has resurfaced in Washington state, where he has set up shop at the Biologic Institute, a short drive away from the Discovery Institute. Weber told me that Biologic was a "branch of Discovery". Both Axe and Discovery spokesperson Rob Crowther insist that it is a "separate entity".

Biologic's staff consists of at least three researchers, including Ann Gauger, who like Axe signed a petition titled "a statement of dissent against Darwin's theory of evolution" that was organised by the Discovery Institute in September 2005. In 1985 Gauger published a paper on cell adhesion in fruit flies (Nature, vol 313, p 395) while completing a PhD from the University of Washington, and then went on to publish more papers as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Her former supervisor, Larry Goldstein, now at the University of California, San Diego, expressed surprise when he learned of her association with the anti-evolution movement.

Gauger would not speak to New Scientist about her work. According to Axe, the projects currently under way at Biologic include "examining the origin of metabolic pathways in bacteria, the evolution of gene order in bacteria, and the evolution of protein folds".

Certainly the topics Axe mentions are of interest to science, says Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who testified as an expert witness for the pro-evolution side at the Dover trial. Miller adds that they might be of particular interest to people intent on undermining evolution if, like Axe's earlier work on protein folding, they can be used to highlight structures and functions whose origins and evolution are not well understood.

In addition to protein and cell biology, Biologic is pursuing a programme in computational biology which draws on the expertise of another of its researchers, Brendan Dixon, a former software developer at Microsoft. According to Axe, "On the computational side, we are nearing completion of a system for exploring the evolution of artificial genes that are considerably more life-like than has been the case previously."

Dixon also declined to speak with New Scientist, but there are reasons why the computational arena might be of interest to the anti-evolution movement. Starting in 2001, Robert Pennock at Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues wrote a computer program that behaves like a self-replicating organism able to mutate unpredictably and evolve (Nature, vol 423, p 139). The experiment demonstrates how natural selection and random mutation give rise to increasingly complex organisms.

For anti-evolutionists, this was a discouraging result. "That one really got to them," says Barbara Forrest, a philosopher at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond who studies the anti-evolution movement. It would not be surprising if Biologic wanted to challenge the impact of Pennock's work by finding a counter-example in which a computer simulation fails to produce complexity by random mutation alone. Such a counter-example, once published, would be available for citation by proponents of ID. Even if the citations do not appear in peer-reviewed literature, says Forrest, they could still have an influence on politicians and school board officials, who might not be sensitive to this distinction.

Miller agrees that work of this kind would help anti-evolutionists politically. "If Axe can produce a few more papers in good journals they will be able to cite a growing body of evidence favouring ID," he says.

However, Steve Fuller, a sociologist at the University of Warwick, UK, who testified in favour of ID in the Dover trial, believes the Biologic Institute's activities could help break down barriers between religious people and scientists. "Regardless of whether the science cuts any ice against evolution, one of the virtues is that it could provide a kind of model for how religiously motivated people can go into the lab."

Ronald Numbers, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied creationism, views it in a different light. The lab's existence will help sustain support within the anti-evolution community, he says. "It will be good for the troops if leaders in the ID movement can claim: 'We're not just talking theory. We have labs, we have real scientists working on this.'"
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 09:47 am
Spam from Reed Elsevier a global publisher and information provider. It came into being fall 1992 as the result of a merger between Reed International, a British trade book and magazine publisher, and the Dutch science publisher Elsevier NV. It is listed on several of the world's major stock exchanges.
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spendius
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 10:10 am
I've done a lot of business in the past with Reed International which is now called St Regis. They make paper products in large quantities.

Robert Maxwell was heavily involved in scientific publications and he must have had connections to this business through the Daily Mirror.

Your post has nothing to do with science wande. It's about hearts and minds. You're trolling. Again.

In all innocence I expect but the effect is the same on the betas and gammas around whom it is a relatively easy task to weave incantations and magic spells with strange polysyllabics and high sounding titles.

Einstein would have laughed his sock off.
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Wolf ODonnell
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 01:33 pm
Just because the ID proponents have labs does not mean they are in actual fact scientific. May I point out that in Stalin's Russia, there were many labs dedicated to the unscientific dogma of Lysenkoism. That does not mean Lysenkoism was scientific or right.

Also, I can't help but notice the thick quantities of irony that you seem to be posting, spendius.

When actually challenged to provide evidence to support your claims, spendi, all you do is spout complete and utter nonsense, most of which I can't help but notice is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Now there is no evidence to suggest that being against the teaching of absolute bollocks in science classes has any "psychosomatic" problems, partially because psychosomatic means of or relating to a physical disease that has mental origins.

The absence of a badly thought out piece of ideology does not create psychosomatic disorders, although it might create sociological problems and I do believe the word you are looking for is 'sociological' and not psychosomatic. However, you've never really paid much attention to the proper definitions of words and terms, it would seem, as evidenced by some of the vague definitions you've given for Intelligent Design.

Intelligent Design can't be taught. Laughing What use is it then?
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spendius
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 02:03 pm
Bertrand Russell wrote-

Quote:
Primarily, we call something "good" when we desire it, and "bad" when we have an aversion from it. But our use of words is more constant than our desires, and therefore we shall continue to call a thing good even at moments when we are not actually desiring it......And the laudatory associations of the word "good" may generate a desire which would not otherwise exist......Moreover the use of words is social, and therefore we learn only to call a thing good, except in rare circumstances, if most of the people we associate with are willing to call it good. Thus "good" comes to apply to things desired by the whole of a social group. It is evident, therefore, that there can be more good in a world where the desires of different individuals harmonise than in one where they conflict. The supreme moral rule should, therefore, be: Act so as to produce harmonious rather than discordant desires.


That, in effect, says that the New Scientist quote is immoral as are the DI pronouncements both of which promote conflict at the expense of the kids.

Russell offers marriage as a harmonious arrangement and thus good and the duel as a conflict arrangement and thus bad. But marriage puts the partners in conflict with all others in its exclusivity and is obviously contra evolutionary principles as it sets up reproduction on entirely artificial lines (money, class, property) and the moreso the higher up the social scale is the case in view.

I'm discerning a force field. New Scientist/Reed International/Daily Mirror/Robert Maxwell/Others setting out to overturn the social order using evolution theory propagandised through outlets like the NS. Reed is a mass production unit. Few of its products would be bought by the posh.

The Daily Mirror has long been a left-wing rag and it was once owned by Mr Maxwell who was a Labour MP. He also owned a football club and football is the sport of the lower orders. The Daily Mirror would present an "incident" in Court Circles in a totally different way than would the Daily Telegraph. All the time. Day in day out. Year after year.

To see wande's NS quote, and all his others, as isolated events is as unscientific as unscientific can get. It, they, work on tickling the subjective G-spot. Continually. Positive conditioning.

There is science involved but it isn't to do with the quote it is to do with the cause of it. Celeste, if she is a good writer, could easily, for a 30% salary increase, a larger motor and a key to the higher washroom, present the story in an other light. Just as professional footballers can transfer their allegiance from one club to another.

The science of sunbathing would start at the sun. Not with subjective feeling. And skin pigmentation.

Which leads to some interesting specualtions. For example, the qualities the white races ascribe to the black races are perfectly natural for races evolved in hot climates from an evolutionary perspective and thus beyond criticism. The white races- "working their fingers to the bone to keep warm", as I think Henry Miller had it, would embrace the work ethic and disparage those who didn't.

Wow-- thanks wande. It's the battle of old settled money against new widely distributed money. On the one side those whose incomes derive from selling billions of items to many against those few who hold large portfolios of wealth and presumably fund Disco and probably less successful outfits.

There are no truly educational or scientific considerations involved, just spin, and as there is a widespread "belief" that there are you have a religion.

O Come O Ye Faithful.

The debate is about which religion will have "good" social consequences. And it's a mighty complex matter.

I don't think it could happen here because our educational system is run from the PM down through the Cabinet and outwards and those running it have access to top level philosphy and science including psychology and social statistics whereas your school boards only have access to the NS,and suchlike, and their media sources and thus can hardly be expected to have the slightest inkling what they are talking about. The NS will be on the coffee table, when it is, like the potted plants are in the hallway, when they are.
0 Replies
 
farmerman
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 02:15 pm
RAther than getting caught on the snag hook that are the spendi posts, I posted that from the Discovery Institutes website , which was an attempt to downplay and actually celebrate the "non-customer" tone of Dr Bevier.


I guess, Im interested in this new hunt for the origin of protein folds. Not being well versed in how we wash and press our peoteins, Im guessing that protein folds are a new direction for the search for Irreducible Complexities. Wolf, Im trying to get a better handle on this phenom , can you shed further light on the work theyre doing.
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spendius
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 02:20 pm
"Folding protein"!!! I ask you.
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Wolf ODonnell
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 03:13 pm
farmerman wrote:
RAther than getting caught on the snag hook that are the spendi posts, I posted that from the Discovery Institutes website , which was an attempt to downplay and actually celebrate the "non-customer" tone of Dr Bevier.


I guess, Im interested in this new hunt for the origin of protein folds. Not being well versed in how we wash and press our peoteins, Im guessing that protein folds are a new direction for the search for Irreducible Complexities. Wolf, Im trying to get a better handle on this phenom , can you shed further light on the work theyre doing.


Well, the very definition of Intelligent Design means the Biologic Institute can't be looking for IC in this area. Protein folding isn't subject to irreducible complexity, only phenotypic adaptations are. (Click on the word, if you don't know what phenotype means and hence, phenotypic means).

Maybe they're latching on to straws, or rather, the Levinthal paradox, a thought experiment, which goes thusly:

Unfolded polypeptide chains (chains of amino acids) have a very large number of degree of freedom. Thus the molecule has an astronomical number of possible confirmations. The original article by Cyrus Levinthal gives a number of 10 to the power of 143. That, by the way, spendius, is 10 with 143 zeros after it. If the polypeptide chain is to fold, to create the proper protein, by chance alone i.e. the sampling of all possible confirmations, it would take a time longer than the age of the Universe (assuming old Earth age, that is).

Since proteins obviously don't take that long, they can't possibly do that. In fact, scientists have observed that they don't.

So the question is, how do polypeptides fold into 3D globular proteins? I suspect they're trying to prove some kind of... Well, I don't know. Anything they come up with won't prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer, unless they prove beyond a doubt that protein folding isn't caused by any natural causes whatsoever and to do that, they'd have to discount every single hypothesis that protein folding scientists can come up with. That could take some time... perhaps, longer than the age of the Universe.
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Setanta
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 03:16 pm
It sounds like a standard poofist tactic--attempting to discredit science, or to show that the ramifications of scientific theory are impossible, rather than actually offering any testable proof for their own theory.
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 03:33 pm
TCR wrote-

Quote:
I'm here for you buddy


The problems associated with the "here" from a scientific point of view, and you have been stressing how important the scientific point of view is, are a minor matter compared to the problems associated with the "I" concept. The "I" has been seen for sometime now as a series of events of a complexity beyond the mind of mankind.

Perhaps the Relationships forum would be more suited to your style.

You could make a contribution to A2K on my behalf though as I'm a guest from another country and thus not expected to offer one.

Sit a kid down in front of The Masters. Or NASCAR. There's a glimpse of how you teach intelligent design. These adults squabbling over this issue look like a tribe of primitives squabbling over the catch. They are no use to kids.

fm wrote-

Quote:
RAther than getting caught on the snag hook that are the spendi posts


Well, well. Do you realise fm what you said there. Imagine Mrs Clinton trying that one.

Wolf- you are wasting your time slagging me off. It's water off a duck's back. If it influences others in some way that's something I can live with too.

The psychosomatic problem is not only concerned with disease. It is just as much, if not more, concerned with pleasanter things. In fact, some people think it is rather the absence of the pleasanter things that is a cause of disease.
0 Replies
 
rosborne979
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 03:59 pm
Wolf_ODonnell wrote:
So the question is, how do polypeptides fold into 3D globular proteins? I suspect they're trying to prove some kind of... Well, I don't know. Anything they come up with won't prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer, unless they prove beyond a doubt that protein folding isn't caused by any natural causes whatsoever and to do that, they'd have to discount every single hypothesis that protein folding scientists can come up with. That could take some time... perhaps, longer than the age of the Universe.

Nice! Smile
0 Replies
 
farmerman
 
  1  
Thu 10 Apr, 2008 03:59 pm
I recall from biochem work that it was damn near impossible to predict the crystallization patterns of proteins. Therefore their evolutionary significance had always been a given in my mind.

Im certain that protein folding and ID are linked by function and structure and , hence IC(at least in their minds--we will see how this plays out because Ive been following the Intelligent design research webs to see whether anything new has been proposed. Just like KEn Miller intimates that they ll take those areas in evolution that we presently have no research or answers and plant a flag of ownership.
Look at the enzyme cascades in blood clotting. The research was already available to dicount the IDjits, but Behe tried to publish anyway.


Ive seen that the INtelligent REsearch websites have given up on all things geological and paleontological. This was a wise thing to stipulate to. IDjits are now the biggest fans of "Old EARth","Common ancestry" 'Derived forms and macroevolution" and a couple of more things by which theyve been trying to dissolve their Creationist umbilicus.
0 Replies
 
 

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