Intelligent Design Question

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by mathman, Nov 24, 2005.

  1. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Okay. So what? That's just the opinion of one group ...does that make it the absolute truth, or what? Those are just words spoken by someone, then posted on a wedsite ...big deal.

    Baron Max
     
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  3. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Well, it's sorta' like gathering a group of people and setting up a game of dice, huh? The "guiding force" is the person who sets up that game; the random events occur when someone throws the dice.

    Baron Max
     
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  5. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    No it isn't.

    It's like a group of people in a room. They randomly acquire new characteristics, such as gills, wings, horns, extra penis, 4 ears.

    Then a pipe bursts and the room gets flooded.

    The people sprouting gills survive.

    You multiply those.

    They randomly acquire new characteristics.

    The room might stay the same, or maybe the water is drained.

    The people with gills AND lungs survive. People with only gills die.

    next round.

    Nobody set up the room. Nobody is influencing the room.
     
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  7. valich Registered Senior Member

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    No! It definitely isn't! The outcome of throwing dice has a statistical probability: random chance does not!
     
  8. CharonZ Registered Senior Member

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    I think there is still a mix-up here.
    Evolution just describes a change of allele frequency over time. It does not need to be directed somehow.
    However there are elements that affect evolution (or are the driving forces behind it).
    Mutations change the overall allele pool (but they usually do not affect the distribution significantly, as they are only few). As such mutations are not directed, but of course mutation rates have a probabilistic nature and are as such explorable by statistics (in contrast to what valich said). Yet the mechanism itself is unguided and does not guide.
    one of the main shaping forces which can eventually lead to some kind of shape into evolution (and that is basically what spuriousmonkey and others already said) is natural selection, which eliminates (or reduces the frequencies) of certain alleles. Of course under any given conditions there are an almost infinite number of selective pressures on a population so that this is usually not very clear cut in reality as for instance in the thought experiment with the flooded room, but nonetheless these forces can shape the gene pool and thus direct evolution.
    However these selective pressures are biotic and abiotic functions (e.g. temperature, humidity, disease, predation etc.) of the environment and do not need some ominous metaphysical force...
     
  9. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    23,053
    But many people believe that "someone" DID set up the "room". You certainly can't deny that fact. But I still keep asking y'all ....where did it all come from in the very, very first place? Y'all keep talking about evolution and changes in species, but where the hell did the animals come from to even begin changing and adapting? And none of you can or will answer it ...and your beloved science can't answer it either. Thus ....."intelligent design".

    Until y'all can explain that issue, then ID is here to stay ...and none of your scinetific bullshit papers on evolution or adaptation is gonna' change it.

    Baron Max
     
  10. CharonZ Registered Senior Member

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    Actually ID is not about "setting up the room". They talk about the design of its denizens. Creationism adressses the creation of the room.
     
  11. MetaKron Registered Senior Member

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    It's funny. "Intelligent design" is promoted by the stupidest president we have ever had, and it is going to make a lot of Kansans stupid.
     
  12. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    I guess I should have used the word 'cave' instead of 'room'.

    But it was only an analogy. Analogies are not to be taken literally.
     
  13. guthrie paradox generator Registered Senior Member

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    First question- is ID a scientific attempt to answer your question?
    2nd question.- if it is, where is the science?

    3rd question- What has evolution got to do with cosmology?
    Answer- not necessarily anything.

    So, I presume you havnt read up on abiogenesis, big bang theory, thermodynamics, genetics, geology, physics, or any of the other interlocking scientific disciplines that form the grand structure that we call "science".

    Science is about answering questions that can be answered. Often we dont know beforehand if they can be answered or not, but the first step is to frame them so that they are amenable to scientific (i.e. near objective) examination. Please come back when you have formulated your questions like that. Then we can talk science, but at the moment you seem to want to talk philosophy and religion.
     
  14. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Who said that my question have to be answered by "science"? I don't care who or what answers it.

    Sounds like a dirty, nasty word to me!! I've checked my word list from "See Spot Run" and "Cat in the Hat" and couldn't find that word.

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    Well, if science can't answer it, then perhaps we should look to Intelligent Design for the answer? I mean, why not? I nor anyone else I know insists that all answer must come from "science". Has "science", for example, explained all about what most of us have experienced ......LOVE? Nope, they can't do it, yet most of us feel it, sense it and talk about all the time!

    Okay .....I'll wait for science to answer the questions. But in the meantime, many of the world will continue to believe in ID. Fair enough? And remember, you, as a scientist, should be tolerant of the beliefs of others and not condemn them or their beliefs until you can prove otherwise. Fair enough?

    Baron Max
     
  15. Physics Monkey Snow Monkey and Physicist Registered Senior Member

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    Your question is a very good one, but I don't know where you got the idea that science can't answer it. Science has not yet given a complete description of the transition from non-life to life and progress is slow because the problem is very difficult. Nevertheless, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that all the basic biochemical components that one would need to form a primitive cell could form spontaneously under the right conditions. I won't deny that a complete demonstration does not yet exist, but that is hardly the same as saying that science is unable to explain it especially since progress has been made.
     
  16. mathman Valued Senior Member

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    "Okay .....I'll wait for science to answer the questions. But in the meantime, many of the world will continue to believe in ID. Fair enough? And remember, you, as a scientist, should be tolerant of the beliefs of others and not condemn them or their beliefs until you can prove otherwise. Fair enough?

    Baron Max "

    I guess you are admitting that ID is not science. On that most of us agree!
     
  17. valich Registered Senior Member

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    Mutations occur at a statistical probability but the specific type of mutation towards a given end has no statistical significance. This is what I meant.

    "Selective pressures on a population" do not "direct evolution": they "allow" it to occur and allow those resulting better-suited phenotype traits to be maintained and to become more permanently established in the population.
     
  18. TheAlphaWolf Registered Senior Member

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    for the evidence... the miller something (lol I'm bad at names) experiment proved that amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins, could have emerged in the earth way back when life first formed.
    As for how life began, I really can't explain that very well. There are many hypotheses and so I guess I'll have to pick one. Let's see what my book says...
    *goes off to get biology book*
    AHA here it is. blah blah blah.... 3.8 billion years.... nitrogen.... blah blah... basically two chemists figured out that earth's early atmosphere had been a reducing (electron-adding) environment, in which organic compounds could have formed from simple molecules. The energy came form lightning and intense UV radiation (no ozone remember?). then stanley miller did that experiment where amino acids and other organic compounds were formed. hmm... they apparently also found "complex, oily hydrocarbons"...
    bloody murder! "4.5 billion year old chonodrite (something from space) collected in southern austrualia in 1969 contained more than 80 amino acids" :-O modern life only uses 20 or so amino acids! (I had to learn them all... tryptophan, phenylalanine, etc) "remarkably the proportions of these amino acids are similar to those produced by the miller-urey experiment"
    and it says they can't possibly be contaminants from earth (the amino acids in the chonsomething) for some chemistry reasons i don't get.
    (to be continued)
    now abiotic synthesis of polymers:
    "researchers have produced amino acid polymers by dripping solutions of amino acids onto hot sand, clay, or rock. The polymers formed spontaneously without the help of enzymes or ribosomes" "such molecules might have acted as weak catalysts for a variety of reactions on early earth"
    protobionts:
    "while miller-urey-type experiments have yielded some of the nitrogenous bases of DNA and RNA, they have not produced anything like nucleotides"
    ALTHOUGH... They have! I read a ... scientific american?... article that said they had created self-replicating RNA in a lab... exclusively with the environment of old earth, and without cheating (using RNA to start with and then making it self-replicating or something like that)
    "necessary conditions may have been met by protobionts, agregates of abiotically produced molecules surrounded by a membrane... structure" they "exhibit some of the properties assosiated with life including simple reproduction and metabolism as well as maintenance of internal chemical environment different from that of their surroundings"
    "lab experiments demonstrate that protobionts could have formed spontaneously from abiotically produced organic compuonds. for example small membrane-bounded droplets called liposomes can form when lipids or other organic molecules are added to water. (figure 26.4)" (shows a liposome "giving birth" to smaller liposomes, and another one having simple metabolism.)
    blah blah "much like the lipid bilayer of a plasma membrane" ... "some liposomes store energy in the form of a membrane potential, a voltage across the surface. such liposomes can discharge the volage in nerve cell-like fashio, such excitability is a characteristic of all life"
    if some things come together, like the amino acids and polymers getting inside the liposome "then those droplets could have selectively taken up organic molecules from their environment"
    (to be continued)
    RNA world:
    first genetic material- probably RNA.
    two people found RNA (which plays a central role in protein synthesis" can also carry out a number of enzyme-like catalytic functions. They called 'em ribozymes. they can make complementary pieces of RNA, if they're supplied with nucleotide building blocks. others can remove segments of themselves (self splicing introns), or can act on diff. molecules such as tRNA.
    "natual selection on the molecular level has been observed operating on RNA populations in the laboratory. Unlike double-stranded DNA," "RNA molecules assume a variety of 3-D shapes" ..."the molecules thus have both a genotpe and a phenotype" "RNA molecules with certain base sequences are more stable and replicate faster and with fewer errors"
    blah blah blah, families of closely related RNA, "occasionally a copying error will result in a molecule that folds into a shape that is even more stable or more adept at self-replication than the ancestral sequence."
    blah blah suggested that " rna molecules may have been short virus-like sequences and these sequenes were aided in their replication by random amino acid polymers that had rudimentary catalytic capabilities", and that may have happened in protobionts.
    ugh. there's more but i don't feel like typing it all out.
    I'm guessing it says something about from then on, with the help of natural selection, RNA could have lost a DNA atom and become DNA, and then ta-da you have your first cells.
    there, plenty of evidence that it could have happened.
     
  19. valich Registered Senior Member

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    According to the "deletrious mutation model we can estimate the total number of deleterious mutants per DNA sequence (or per genome)"....but according to the neutral mutation model, there are certain segments of DNA that are not subject to mutation. In order to explain the difference in the number of insertions and deletions per genome, we need to assume a high mutation rate under certain DNA sequence and a weak selection rate amonst others. There is a transposable probability rate.

    Source: "Statistical Method for Testing the Neutral Mutation Hypothesis by DNA Polymorphism," by Fumio Tajima, Department of Biology, Kyushu University, a 1989 manuscript submitted to the Genetics Society of America.

    If the mutation rates differ between DNA sequences, where some are more permanently established than others, then how can you develop an overall probability statistical mutation rate?

    Mutation rates can be used to estimate when species diverged, but only under the given conditions, and the type of genetic evolution is what is being estimated and observed. Yeh sure, mutations rates are easy to observe in bacteria other single celled organisms, but calculating the mutations per chromosome in higher organisms is questionable and involves the estimation of mutation rate of genetic markers for a particular gene sequence.
    http://www.kerchner.com/dnamutationrates.htm

    "Recently an attempt was made to estimate the age of the human race using mitochondrial DNA. This material is inherited always from mother to children only. By measuring the difference in mitochondrial DNA among many individuals, the age of the common maternal ancestor of humanity was estimated at about 200,000 years. A problem is that rates of mutation are not known by direct measurement, and are often computed based on assumed evolutionary time scales. Thus all of these age estimates could be greatly in error. In fact, many different rates of mutation are quoted by different biologists."
    http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/mitochondria.html

    "It is easy to distinguish cells that have simply adapted to the toxic conditions from resistant mutants. Adaption is a transient property that depends upon continued exposure to the toxic conditions....
    In contrast, distinguishing between induced vs spontaneous mutations is much more difficult. For many years, most microbiologists believed that mutations in bacteria were induced by exposure to a particular environment."
    http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/~smaloy/MicrobialGenetics/topics/mutations/fluctuation.html
     
  20. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Where'd that stuff come from? Where did lightning come from? Where did the UV radiation come from? Where did energy come from?

    I appreciate all the typing that you did, but next time, look FIRST to how anything came into being in the very first place ...if you can't answer that question, then....?

    Baron Max
     
  21. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    Where did god come from Baron?
     
  22. TheAlphaWolf Registered Senior Member

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    uh... the same places they come from now. Electrically charged molecules in the atmosphere, and the sun. Energy comes from all over the place... thermal energy from volcanoes, hot springs, hydrothermal vents, the sun, etc., etc, etc.

    I can answer those questions... I thought they were pretty damn obvious, so I didn't feel the need to explain them.
     
  23. valich Registered Senior Member

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    No , please explain. There IS a need to explain them.
     

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