Intelligent Design

Too bad that Nobel Prizes are only awarded to people — natural selection deserves dozens of them. Scientists decode how plants avoid sunburn Source: Arizona State University Too much sun – for plants as well as people – can be harmful to long-term health. But to avoid the botanical equivalent of “lobster tans,” plants have developed an intricate internal defense mechanism called photoprotection, which acts like sunscreen to ward off the sun’s harmful rays. “We knew that biomolecules called carotenoids participate in this process of photoprotection, but the question has been, ‘How does this work?’ ” says Iris Visoly-Fisher, a postdoctoral research associate in the Biodesign Institute at ASU. Carotenoids act as “wires” to carry away the extra sunlight energy Read More ›

The molecular machinery that starts the process by which a biological cell divides into two identical daughter cells apparently worked so well early on that evolution has conserved it across the eons in all forms of life on Earth. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have shown that the core machinery for initiating DNA replication is the same for all three domains of life — Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya. MORE Given that, according to Carl Woese, the three domains are not descended from a common ancestor (see here), is it plausible that this same switch could have arisen apart from design three times?

Uncommon Descent is about to become “The Intelligent Design Weblog of William Dembski, Denyse O’Leary, and Friends.” O’Leary is a Toronto-based Canadian journalist and the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004), an investigation of the intelligent design controversy. In addition to being an equal partner with me on this blog, Denyse has also agreed to moderate it. I want to thank DaveScot for his untiring efforts this last half year in moderating this blog. But as he wrote here: Commenting is what I like doing here. Moderating is a pain that I can do without. If appending my comments directly onto others is too much to ask in return for all the time spent moderating then I’m Read More ›

An objector to ID posed the following question to a friend of a friend: “According to Michael Behe’s view of ID (as developed in Darwin’s Black Box), it seems right to say that the system by which thunder and lightning is generated (composed of the sun, water on the ground to heat up and evaporate, thundercloud, air, ground) would qualify as “designed.” After all, it is, a la Behe, a system of several well-matched, separate, interacting parts accomplishing a function beyond the individual components and in which removing one piece does away with the function. But since it obviously wasn’t designed, the method of design detection given in Behe’s book is fundamentally flawed and gives many false positives. Is this Read More ›

Emergence of protein fold families through rational design Feng Ding1, Nikolay V Dokholyan1¤ 1 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Biochemistry and Biophysics, Chapel Hill, NC, United States of America PROVISIONAL ABSTRACT Diverse proteins with similar structures are grouped into families of homologs and analogs if their sequence similarity is correspondingly higher or lower than 20-30%. It was suggested that protein homologs and analogs originate from a common ancestor and diverge in their distinct evolutionary time scales, emerging as a consequence of the physical properties of the protein sequence space. Although a number of studies have determined key signatures of protein family organization, the sequence-structure factors that differentiate the two evolution-related protein families remain unknown. Here, we stipulate that Read More ›

For your further amusement from a man who just doesn’t know when to stop. From: RJDownard@snip Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 15:39:30 EDT Subject: Uncommon Descent indeed! To: william.dembski@snip Dear Bill You take “all responsibility for any errors” in Coulter’s evolution chapters. Your words, not mine. Coulter has written what she has written. Either you are willing to defend each of her published assertions, or you may repudiate them. You have done neither. Thus the questions I asked remain. As amply evidenced by her prior works, Coulter can get confused entirely on her own. But it is also legitimate to wonder to what extent her published antievolution statements due to your proud tutoring? In my effort to resolve this point, Read More ›

Here is an exchange between Hannah Maxson (a rising senior with a triple major in the sciences at Cornell) and professor Allen MacNeill along with the various members of Uncommon Descent (UDers), Pandas Thumb (Pandas), ISCID, BSG, IDEA, NCSE, and other Cornell students and alumni.
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And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that natural selection also built the chariot, toaster oven, and space shuttle. Go here for another case of nanodesign, unanticipated but readily rationalized by evolutionary theory: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/12/0321217&from=rss.

Mark, evidently hoping others might succeed where he failed, continues to be a shill for anti-Dembski “authors”. Give it up, Mark. There’s no such thing as a Free Lunch.

(adapted from a discussion at Evolution and Design )

All right guys, a potential area of ID research. Who knows how long it may take to uncover, but here is where Explanatory Filter (EF) methods may help and where IDers can make a killer breakthrough for their theory if they succeed. There will be money, fame, and glory if this enigma is solved by IDers.

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DaveScot summed it up in a previous UD comment perhaps better than I have ever heard it expressed:

…the ballyhooed 150 years of acceptance of Darwinian evolution is irrelevant — it was based on vastly incomplete knowledge of the nanometer-scale machinery and information that drives all of life. Even today we have barely scratched the surface of this nanotechnology marvel that is the DNA-based living cell. All previous bets are off. The modern synthesis can best be described as obsolete — a patchwork quilt of ad hoc hypotheses propping up a failed theory worse than the epicycles used to keep alive the theory that the earth was the center of the universe.

All previous bets are indeed off.
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Does Luria-Delbruck really mean that mutations are random? Or might it indicate something else?
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Darwinists want to argue that natural selection is teleological. That cellular systems are able to ‘find’ solutions to life’s challenges because of the cell’s ability to reproduce. Using an analogy to mathematical problem solving, this is, in reality, no more than implementing an iterative process. And, as such, the question to be asked is: do we, even now, have a computer powerful enough, and a scientific sophistication capable enough, to find the kinds of solutions nature has found? Article after article are now appearing that tell us the answer is ‘no’.

But, prescinding from this question, let’s look at the latest such article, one dealing with ‘microtubules’. Microtubules form the very structure of cells; they give cells their 3-dimensional character. Cells couldn’t reproduce without microtubules. And what is it we see now? Microtubules represent an engineering skill that is completely beyond anything humans have been able to do so far. But, if microtubules are essential to cell reproduction, then how could this possibly be the result of an ‘iterative’ process? Who engineered this miracle of design? This is more than just a challenge for abiogenesis advocates. If ‘iterative’ processes are completely unable to explain what we see here, what does this say about our confidence in invoking them when it comes to other engineering marvels we find in Nature?

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“One thing we will discover is that buried deep within the DNA of humans, Vulcans (even Klingons) and other intelligent bi-pedal races is a mathematical code, something buried so deep and of such complexity that it could not possibly have occurred by chance.” http://bztv.typepad.com/newsviews/files/ST2004Reboot.pdf

Many people who argue against Intelligent Design’s position on transitional forms often don’t have any clue what it is that is actually being said. I’d like to take a moment to clear it up. If anyone disagrees with my commentary (especially ID’ers — I’d hate to misrepresent other’s opinions), please post below. My main point in writing is not so much a defence of the concept (though I do attempt that) but rather to show why it makes sense even in the absence of special creation, and why its use is not limitted to people who agree with special creation, but anyone who believes in a telic form of evolution.

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