On 4/20/2011 3:26 PM, andrel wrote:
>> But there's a reference to intelligence and design. "This protein could
>> not have evolved", even if found, does not imply "someone designed it."
>
> But in all likelihood it would imply that it's presence would be easier
> explained by assuming it was designed. By someone, something, a
> committee, or a mad scientist.
>
Sadly, you can make a similar argument with the bridge analogy. That 
bridge, since there is no way it could stay up if you removed certain 
things, "could not have been designed", so it must QED be a natural 
formation. The only reason we don't hear people making this sort of 
moronic claim is purely bias. In both cases, the correct answer is, "We 
don't know what scaffolding may have existed, which allowed it to 
evolve/be built." In either argument, lack of understanding of how it 
could have formed doesn't prove the assertion that one or the other 
solution is true. Only finding, a) in the case of DNA, a species that 
still has part/all of the precursor, b) figuring out how such a 
precursor might have happened, or c) in the case of a bridge, watching 
someone build a similar one, gets you any place. What doesn't get you 
any place? Postulating that some invisible architect, alien, god, or 
otherwise, simply "inserted" the whole, complete, design into the genome 
(or dropped a complete bridge in place), without themselves using some 
sort of scaffolding to do it. Frankly, it doesn't matter if they used 
mental scaffolding and then just sequenced the gene from that, or 
anti-gravity beams, to lift the rocks. You still need some sort of 
"process" to get the result.

ID's central premise, sadly, is that it just "poofed" into being. Hell, 
even the ones arguing "front loading", fail to grasp that any such 
"master genetic code", to avoid breaking the organism fatally, while 
inserting new features, has to take clear steps, in which it replaces 
parts of the system, only as possible, before reaching and end result. 
You don't get to, in a running machine, replace entire sections of the 
guts, unless you can turn the thing off, or reboot it, or something. 
What "front loading" suggests is nothing less that replacing a whole 
mess of "working" code, all at once, the same way you would your video 
drivers and core kernel drivers, without either rebooting the machine, 
or restarting the kernel. Which, doesn't work. Thus, to do it, you need, 
again, something that can simply "magic" the changes in, whole cloth, 
without restarting/rebooting/etc.

There is a reason why a lot of biologists use the term IDiocy to 
describe this. Sadly, a few too many comp-sci people fail to grasp why 
its similarly intractable in terms of computer code (where, the 
equivalent in that would be taking a running application, and inserting 
new code into it, without breaking links, jump points, functionality, or 
mangling the data being processed, mid-change).

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