Intelligent Design

[jtls1986]

Is anyone familiar with this concept...I was introduced to this recently and I find it to be quite convincing...

Considering that Darwin himself stated that his theory of evolution would completely break down ***IF*** a biological entity was capable of developing complex systems without taking slow steps of slowly evolving similar structures that would eventually lead to the complex systems...

After observing a bacterium, and focusing on a single structure, the flagellum...scientists revealed a very complex biological machine....involving structures similar to a human machine that would run wheels or something like that...

Anyway, the scientists declared that such a complex system could not have been capable of evolving from organisms that originated from a "proto-earth", since the proteins and enzymes must connect in a particular fashion...and cannot connect differently...if the enzymes connect incorrectly....the enzymes will fall apart...and the protein itself would not have been produced...

These enzymes have thousands...if not billions of information that tell the enzyme to connect to a specific enzyme....and after connecting...the enzymes will roll up in a certain fashion to finally produce the protein..

How could primitive cells that originated from amino acids suddenly form such a complex chain of information that would form enzymes...and finally proteins that would together....form a complex bacterial flagellum?

[bernee51]

Is anyone familiar with this concept...I was introduced to this recently and I find it to be quite convincing...

what do you mean by "intelligent design" and why do you find it interesting?

After observing a bacterium, and focusing on a single structure, the flagellum...scientists revealed a very complex biological machine....involving structures similar to a human machine that would run wheels or something like that...

Anyway, the scientists declared that such a complex system could not have been capable of evolving from organisms that originated from a "proto-earth", since the proteins and enzymes must connect in a particular fashion...and cannot connect differently...if the enzymes connect incorrectly....the enzymes will fall apart...and the protein itself would not have been produced...

which scientists are you talking about?

Could you please reference where you obtained this information.

How could primitive cells that originated from amino acids suddenly form such a complex chain of information that would form enzymes...and finally proteins that would together....form a complex bacterial flagellum?

how do you think they could? Or is your question rhetorical?

[jtls1986]

I am assuming that you have never heard of the concept of Intelligent Design before?

[otseng]

Let me provide some thoughts from Michael Behe in Darwin's Black Box on ID.

Intelligent Design is design from an intelligent source.

What is design?
"Design is simply the purposeful arrangement of parts." (pg 193)

How then do we detect design?
"For discrete physical systems - if there is not a gradual route to their production - design is evident when a number of separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components." (pg 194)

"In considering design, the function of the system we must look at is the one that requires the greatest amount of the system's internal complexity." (pg 196)

"As the number and quality of the components that fit together to form the system increases, we can be more and more confident of the conclusion of design." (pg 198)

He then gives an illustration which I will paraphrase.

Suppose someone has some mold growing in her refrigerator. She claims that it is a picture of Elvis. If it was just a black smudge, it would be hard to argue that it was designed by anyone or anything.

However, suppose that black mold formed his hair, yellow mold formed his face, green mold formed his pants, red mold formed his shirt, and white mold formed his guitar. Because of the number of components fitting together, it has evidence that it was designed by some intelligence.

[bernee51]

I am assuming that you have never heard of the concept of Intelligent Design before?

I have a good Idea as to what is meant by the term - I was merely asking your definition seeing you raised the topic.

On the subject of flagellum and Michael Behe this from Behe's Empty Box

"The Fallacy of Conclusion by Analogy

When it comes to explaining science to the public, analogies and metaphors are essential tools of the trade. We all can better understand something new and unusual, when it is compared to something we already know: a cell is like a factory, the eye is like a camera, an atom is like a billiard ball, a biochemical system is like a mouse trap. An A is like a B, means A shares some conceptual properties with B. It does not mean A has all the properties of B. It does not follow that what is true for B is therefore true for A. Analogies can be used to explain science, but analogies cannot be used to draw conclusions or falsify scientific theories. Yet Behe commits this fallacy throughout his book. For example:

1. A mousetrap is "irreducibly complex" - it requires all of its parts to work properly.
2. A mousetrap is a product of design.
3. The bacterial flagellum is "irreducibly complex" - it requires all of its parts to work properly.
4. Therefore the flagellum is like a mouse trap.
5. Therefore the flagellum is a product of design."


_____________________________
“Seek Him inside yourself, and learn who it is that says: “My God, my spirit, my understanding, my soul and my body. Understand the source of sorrow and joy, and love and hate, and waking though you don’t want to, and sleeping though you don’t want to, and getting angry when you don’t want to, and falling in love though you don’t want to. For if you closely investigate these things, you will find Him inside yourself.” Monoimos, Gnostic, 3rd century CE

[otseng]

1. A mousetrap is "irreducibly complex" - it requires all of its parts to work properly.
2. A mousetrap is a product of design.
3. The bacterial flagellum is "irreducibly complex" - it requires all of its parts to work properly.
4. Therefore the flagellum is like a mouse trap.
5. Therefore the flagellum is a product of design."

Behe never argues this in the book. What he does do is explain what is irreducible complexity and he gives the example of the mousetrap to illustrate it. Then he argues that several biological features are irreducibly complex.

"By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning." Behe

So, an irreducible complex system has no known natural means for it to evolve. It would have had to evolve from nothing directly to its final form. And the only logical way it can come about is through purposeful design.

[jwu]

There is one major problem with irreducible complexity. It works with distinctive parts of the organism, and doesn't take into account that at some point in the past e.g. two pieces of an organ might have been a single one, which, albeit less efficient, still kept the whole organ working. Later it just split into two or more specialized and more efficient pieces, which now appear not to be related to each other anymore.

Basically, instead of removing parts from the set in order to reduce their number, they get fused together.

That aside, the claimed irreducible complexity thing is a call for a "God of the Gaps".

jwu

[ST88]

"By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning." Behe

So, an irreducible complex system has no known natural means for it to evolve. It would have had to evolve from nothing directly to its final form. And the only logical way it can come about is through purposeful design.

Applying flagella to this hypothesis is so absurd, I don't even know where to begin.

Firstly, there is nothing in the way we understand biology to preclude an entire system from being formed at once. William A. Dembski put it like this:

there’s nothing in the throwing of Scrabble pieces that prevents them from spelling Hamlet’s soliloquy. This is not like releasing a massive object in a gravitational field which, in the absence of other forces, must move in a prescribed path. For the object to move in any other path would thus entail a counterfactual substitution and therefore a miracle. But with the Scrabble pieces there is no prescribed arrangement that they must assume. Nature allows them full freedom of arrangement. Yet it’s precisely that freedom that makes nature unable to account for specified outcomes of small probability. Nature, in this case, rather than being intent on doing only one thing, is open to doing any number of things.

Naturalism's Argument from Invincible Ignorance: A Response to Howard Van Till

That is to say, the one-celled organism is already sufficiently complex to be able to give rise to similarly complex superstructures within it such as the flagellum (or the nucleus) all at once.

Secondly, as for the flagella, there are structures within one-celled organisms that pre-figure flagella. They are called centrioles. Centrioles already exist within the cell as microtubules, which are what flagella are constructed with. It is not known for certain what the purpose of these structures are, as cells that have them removed are not ill-affected. But they are there, and they split during mitosis. Interestingly, plant cells do not contain centrioles, leading to speculation that they are directly involved in some kind of proto-locomotion in some way.

Thirdly, there is some weird behavior regarding these structures that you would not expect from a designed system.

Paramecium have parallel rows of cilia all aligned so that they will beat in the same direction. However, in the 1960's rows of cilia/basal bodies were grafted into Paramecium and they were able to show a change in direction of the beat. The cells passed on the change to future generations even though this was not a genetic alteration.

Cilia and Flagella

What might this imply? It is possible that cilia and flagella structures actually were independent organisms at one point in the evolution story, and were merged by accident somehow. They exchanged nuclear or some othe kind of chemical information that would make the parent cell absorb its structure in a kind of reverse-engineering information storage. Because independent flagella have not been found, it is possible that they died off without this adaptation at some point due to a natural selection event. Far fetched? Sure, but possible.

Here is another interesting discussion of this most odd experiment:
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperai ... n-6-2.html

[otseng]

There is one major problem with irreducible complexity. It works with distinctive parts of the organism, and doesn't take into account that at some point in the past e.g. two pieces of an organ might have been a single one, which, albeit less efficient, still kept the whole organ working.

Can you give an example of such a scenario?

The angle that Behe comes from in respect to irreducible complexity is analyzing the components of biological systems at its most basic level, at the molecular level. This is the lowest level that we can understand on how life works. But understanding how the molecules are put together to form various systems, then we can gain insight on how it can be put together.

So, the question is, at the molecular level, how can it be explained for the origin of these complex components? There are no viable answers apart from an intelligent design.

"In fact, none of the papers published in JME (Journal of Molecular Evolution) over the entire course of its life as a journal has ever proposed a detailed model by which a complex biochemical system might have been produced in a gradual, step-by-step Darwinian fashion." (pg 176)

[jwu]

I don't know much about molecular biology , so currently i am unable to provide such an example. However, concluding from the lack of such molecular biological examples in this thread that it is not possible to happen would be an argument from ignorance.

One example of several components of an organ being fused together to a single more simple (and less performant) one are eyes that use a small hole or slit instead of lens and iris, which do exist in nature (e.g. Nautilus). It can be considered to be a macro-life representation of the molecular biology that you pointed towards.

The eye of the nautilus is a more or less independent development, but it demonstrates nicely that it would be possible to substitute the complex lens system with something a lot simpler without the entire eye ceasing to function. It demonstrates that not the entire eye would have to appear out of nothing at once, but that a gradual development is possible.

http://www.maayan.uk.com/evoeyes2.html

Generally the "irreducible complexity" hypothesis depends on all the components of an organ being exactly as they are today.
As long as it can't completely eliminate the possibility that the current irreducibility is the result of a specialization of components in the past (which before that were able to substitute each other), no conclusions drawn from it can be considered to be proven.

It merely demonstrates that the direct way from nothing to an irreducibly complex system is very unlikely (albeit not impossible...we're talking about a posteriori odds here), but it doesn't say anything about indirect ways. These might be a lot more probable (and obviously are).

jwu