[extropy-chat] intelligent design homework

[The Avantguardian]

--- Robert Lindauer <robgobblin at aol.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure what you have in mind here.  What parts
> of ID don't hold 
> up and aren't useful?  Don't forget to define
> "useful for what" being a 
> purpose-relative context.  It sure answers the
> chicken and the egg 
> problem adequately meanwhile giving us an
> understanding of the big bang 
> and a variety of other problem.  

Actually it doesn't solve the chicken and the egg
problem, it just pushes it back. Where did the
"intelligent designer" come from? I find it just as
easy to believe that life itself is eternal and
unbounded by space-time as I do some a priori
designer. 



For the sake of
> science and 
> histo-biology it is an historical theory, like the
> Permian Extinction 
> and the giant meteor.  MAYBE there was a meteor, it
> certainly would 
> explain why the dinosaurs disappeared in such great
> numbers.  MAYBE 
> Zeus struck them down, that would explain it too. 
> Which is the correct 
> explanation?  Well, which one fits in the best with
> the rest of -our 
> world view-?  Well, it depends on which -world view-
> you have, doesn't 
> it?

Yes, but the world-view I believe is the one that the
rocks that were there at the time tell me. You just
got to learn to speak "rock" is all.

> Well that's just the question isn't it, whether or
> not Theology is a 
> science.  It certainly is in my book, maybe not in
> yours.  Who gets to 
> decide which book we use?

Apparently the neanderthal in the White House.

> Microbiology and chemical biology except for the
> various failed 
> attempts to show that life can spontaneously arise
> from inert matter 
> are completely evolution-neutral (well, except for
> those cases where 
> there appears to be a clear conflict - such as the
> speciation problem 
> or the spontaneous life problem) - in any case, it's
> not relevant to 
> talk about evolution when showing how, for instance,
> chemical receptors 
> inside of a given bacteria are received and what
> process ensues.

Actually microbiologists use evolution all the time.
We control it artificially to get mutations in
microbes that do useful things for us. For example we
select for yeast cells that make less alcohol to get
light beer. Or we put an antibiotic resistance gene
next to gene-x that we want to study and use the
antibiotic to kill off all the microbes that did not
get gene-x. Microbiologists use evolution for lots of
stuff. In fact, microbiology is one of the few fields
of biology where you can see evolution directly at
work, because of the short generation time of
microbes.

>  Nor 
> is it relevant, for the most part, to cancer
> research.

Actually it is very relevant to cancer research. The
best physiological theory we have about cancer
development is called "clonal selection theory". It
essentially says that there is an evolutionary
selection taking place in the body on mutated body
cells. The cells accumulate mutantions and most of the
mutants get killed by the bodies defenses. Once in
awhile, however, a mutation is such that it helps the
cell overcome one of the many layers of the bodies
defenses. First, the blocks to cellular replication,
then mutations that fool the immune system, then
mutations to move around freely in the body, and then
mutations that allow the cancer cells to have the body
grow them blood vessels to supply them with nutrients.
Essentially clonal selection theory is just that these
mutations happen one at a time and each time a cell
aquires one, it passes it down to all its daughter
cells. Thus these mutations stack up over many
generations of cells that evolve from being a "little
unusual" to "extremely dangerous".


  One -could- 
> come up with a theory of how evolution is affecting
> cancer rates and 
> what-not but nothing would prevent an ID theorist
> for accepting that - 
> just the two major points - speciation and
> spontaneous generation.   ID 
> theorists aren't restricted from recognizing that
> competition and 
> adaptation are important factors for expression of
> genetic features, 
> they just reject that changes in gene-pools happen
> "accidentally" - 
> like changing the number of chromosomes in Humans,
> for instance, is 
> generally deadly and always mule-making - and that
> ooze becomes life if 
> you stare at it long enough.

Interestingly, it is being found out that life does
not change "accidently". In fact it has been
determined that many organisms increase their mutation
rate and increase the amount of foreign DNA they
uptake during times of stress. So in a way, many
organisms seem to mutate and thus evolve on purpose.
When the going gets tough, the tough mutate.

> 
> The only branch of biology for which evolution is
> really relevant is 
> Histo-Biology and here it's one of several competing
> theories.  It's 
> not even necessarily the likeliest one given the
> relative dearth of 
> missing links and missing micro-biological
> evidence/theory.

     Actually the dearth of so-called missing links is
mostly explained by the mistaken belief that evolution
always happens really slowly. It does happen really
slowly most of the time. Then for one reason or
another, it speeds up drastically, allowing you to go
from a wolf to a poodle in a couple of hundred
generations. This effect is called puntuated
equilibrium and it is just the understanding that
evolutionary change has different "gears".  
  
> Essentially, with speciation and spontaneous
> generation in evolutionary 
> theory, you get "something magical happens -here-"
> at the point where 
> two mules have a compatible genetic mutation and are
> able to reproduce

      No there is nothing magical, sex is one of the
things that drive speciation. For example if half of
all human women prefered and mated exclusively with
big hairy men because they thought that "big and
hairy" were sexy. And the other half of women only
mated with little naked bald guys, because they
thought that that was sexy. Then in few hundreds of
generations you would probably have to subspecies of
homo sapiens that barely resembled one another.

    One tiny and hairless and the other huge and
hairy. After a few thousand generations, the two might
not be able to interbreed without making a "mule" as
you call it. That is how speciation is believed to
happen in non-geographically isolated conditions. 
 
> I think this is how evolution came along too -
> Darwin decided that 
> there may be another way.   Subsequent generations
> decided that it 
> would be worth studying the -evidence- for it but as
> far as we can 
> tell, there isn't any convincing evidence.

Actually there is a huge body of evidence for
evolution. Just look at the dog breeds from chihuahuas
to great danes that all come from the wolf. Where is
the missing link between the wolf and the poodle?

Spontaneous generation is a trickier problem but there
are testable theories. My favorite of course is
panspermia since that leaves open the possibility that
life arose spontaneously long ago in a lower entropy
universe where the laws of physics were somewhat
different and spread throughout the universe from
there. 

My biggest problem with ID is that, regardless of
whether an intelligent designer exists, to invoke
him/her/it as the root cause of all things is no more
than a cop out to intellectual laziness. God would not
hide from us, if he didn't want us to try to find him.
And saying that everything exists because it is his
will is like calling "oly oly oxen free" only he
doesn't come out of hiding.

The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't attempted to contact us." 
-Bill Watterson

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