Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

In memoriam

The world’s best loved memorial poem, for the war dead was written on the fly by an officer in the Canadian Army medical corps in World War I (1914–1919) Read More ›

How Darwinists confuse the extravagant with the essential

Suppose I constructed a Rube Goldberg machine to do the simple task of turning on a light. Suppose the Rube Goldberg machine were irreducibly complex, being composed of 10,000 components such that if even one component were removed, the Rube Goldberg machine would no longer function. Are the components really essential to turning on a light in the ultimate sense or are the only essential in the sense that the extravagant Rube Goldberg machine would fail without it? The correct answer is that the components are not essential in the ultimate sense since there are simpler mechanisms to turn on lights (aka a “light switch”). The components are “essential” to the turning on of light only in as much as Read More ›

sRNA for Quorum Sensing: Evidence for CSI?

Bacteria demonstrate intra-species communication that is species specific using a partner with a communication molecule. Bacteria are also “multilingual” with a generic trade language for interspecies communication. Bacteria control tasks by signal producing and receiving receptors with a signal carrier. The tasks bacteria conduct depend on the concentration they sense of self bacteria versus generic species concentration. e.g. Bacteria control pathogenicity with quorum sensing. The detailed (small) sRNA required for these control mechanisms is now beginning to be desciphered. See below. Question:
Did bacteria “invent” their communication and control methods via evolutionary stochastic processes?
Or do these constitute Complex Specified Information and thus evidence design? Read More ›