satanus- stop following me around, you obviously want to play in the playground!
Discussion of "intelligent design" (uncapitalized, AlanF)
by AuldSoul 153 Replies latest members adult
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SixofNine
AuldSoul, if I may ask, why don't you just state your case and give supporting evidence?
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TopHat
It is so obvious that his ego is running rampant.
I can't wait til AlanF calls him a moron - probably at about page 5.
I consider it a privilege to have been called a moron by AlanF
porplog....OH PULESEEEEE....If you only knew how you looked and sound to others....may I say it...stay off this thread. I am sure even your Idol AlanF is embarrassed by your comment.
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Elsewhere
You say Intelligent Design, yet there is a waste disposal facility built right next to a recreational facility. -- Robin Williams
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BizzyBee
You say Intelligent Design, yet there is a waste disposal facility built right next to a recreational facility. -- Robin Williams
LOL! Sounds a bit random to me.
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stillajwexelder
chemical design
I once had to critique the work of Professor Rupert Bruce Merrifield to disprove Evolution. Merrifield conducted the first semi-automated amino-acid sequencer. That is a critical step because amino acid goes to amino - acid sequence to peptide, to poly-peptide to protein, to RNA et al to DNA. I used the argument that because there was a huge amount of brain power (Merrifield is now a hero of mine) and because the chemistry involved "chemical blocking" of one end of the peptide and a support polymer at the other end and then unblocking this argued for intelligent design and not chance.
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AlanF
AuldSoul wrote:
: I'll start off by asking some questions regarding known design (as stipulated in the assumptions). I will later pursue two different fields of human design in greater detail, chemical design and software design. These are the only two field (outside of bioengineering) that are (in my opinion) sufficiently advanced for effective comparison to the question of intelligent design/development of life, mechanical design being far too crude for rational comparisons to be drawn outside the bare bones basics.
I have to disagree that chemical design and bioengineering are in any way advanced. I think it's even a stretch to say that software design is particularly advanced. One has only to look at the horrendously buggy software that Microsoft sells to get an idea of what I mean. These are actually very complicated fields, and no one understands the first two except on a level that is extremely experimental. Mechanical design is simple enough, in many cases, that design problems can be understood fairly well, although mechanical engineers have a long way to go in certain areas. The unexpected collapse of the World Trade Center under severe stress is a good example.
Chemical engineering is an extremely experimental field in the sense that what is known of how to design chemical systems has been learned purely by trial and error until very recently. Chemists with long experience and an encyclopedic knowledge of reactions and reaction rates can often begin to design new systems on an intuitive basis, but they inevitably and quickly find that their intuition runs out, and they must go down the path of trial and error. Chemistry, at its root, involves quantum mechanical interactions among assemblages of protons, neutrons, electrons, and the various forces by which they interact. The mathematics describing these interactions is so complicated that only in the last decade or so have computers progressed to the point of being able to simulate anything more complicated than a hydrogen atom. No one has any real intuition about quantum mechanical systems.
By bioengineering, I assume you mean doing things like messing with genes in some manner, cloning, and so forth. Bioengineering in the real sense -- of being able to produce a viable new life form -- is entirely beyond today's technology. Biologists have only recently come to understand how hard some problems in truly engineering even a relatively simple building block like a protein are. A protein is comprised of a long chain of amino acids, but how it really functions is determined by how it folds up into a compact blob as the chain is assembled. While bits of a protein chain can be modeled with sophisticated computer programs, the interactions among the pieces involved in folding are completely beyond today's modeling technologies. No doubt these problems will be overcome some day, but it will be decades, I think. So what little can be called bioengineering today is another mostly trial and error process.
Software design beyond the simplest of algorithms is getting into the "too complex to understand fully" category. Anyone who has tried to design a "significant" program in a low level language like C will know what I mean. Most programmers cannot keep track of all the interactions of the various program modules. This is why good programming companies devote a good deal more resources to testing programs than to their original development. And as we know, when you start with 3rd-grade programmers like Microsoft seems to employ in droves, you end up spending a hundred times the money on debugging and support as on initial development. So development of sophisticated software systems is largely a process of trial and error.
Mechanical design, on the other hand, has long been the means by which many creationists have decided that there must be a Creator, a Supreme Watchmaker. I'm sure you know all about William Paley and his arguments. Isaac Newton thought of the Creator in terms of making mechanical systems like our solar system, and generations of creationists have followed suit. Of course, on the other side we have folks like Richard Dawkins and his "blind watchmaker" arguments. I'm sure we'll get into that later.
In anticipation of one place I think this thread will go, some people in favor of "Intelligent Design" advance an argument they call "irreducible complexity". The idea can be illustrated by a simple mousetrap: remove just one of its parts, and it will not function. Biochemist Michael Behe, in his influential book Darwin's Black Box, used biological systems much more complicated than the mousetrap to try to prove that an Intelligent Designer had a hand in producing life. The flagella of certain bacteria, for example, contain the only known example of a rotating mechanical device -- a motor -- in all of biology. The way blood clots in mammals involves an extremely complicated chain of chemical events, any one of which being missing would cause blood not to clot. Irrefutable examples of irreducible complexity these are, and therefore of Intelligent Design, says Behe. Yet these examples have been shown to be wrong.
: (1) Do designers know all the potential impacts of their design ahead of time,
Absolutely not.
: or do they frequently discover unaccounted for impacts?
All the time. As Thomas Edison said, genius in invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. That 99% is almost entirely taken up in dealing with unanticipated problems. I encounter this on a daily basis in my work as a microchip designer. I also encounter it when using commercial chip design software that is chock full of bugs.
: (2) Do designers experiment with several models along a similar type line to determine which performs most effectively?
Absolutely.
: (3) Do designers weed out those designs which show indications of poor performance and opt instead for those most effective for the intended purposes?
Of course.
: If so, why?
Two reasons: (1) It's easier to stay in business if you sell products that work (Microsoft being a notable exception); (2) Many designers care greatly about their work and view it as an art form. As such, they want to produce the very best design for the intended purpose that they know how. Anything less would be sloppy, and lousy art.
Often the goal of producing effective designs is derailed by politics and such, but I think we're talking about the goals of designers themselves, rather than the goals of the people who usually control the money.
: (so that I don't need to redundantly close each post "Respectfully" you may assume that I submit my posts on this thread with respect)
I've been wondering when you were going to drop that.
AlanF
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AlanF
Proplog, proplog, what am I going to do with you?
I only refer to people who regularly make moronic comments or arguments as morons. AuldSoul is about as far from that as anyone on this board.
Be nice, young man!
AlanF
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AuldSoul
AlanF: In anticipation of one place I think this thread will go, some people in favor of "Intelligent Design" advance an argument they call "irreducible complexity".
I assure you, you will not have to tolerate that. My reasoning on the matter is on a completely different track, altogether.
AlanF: Mechanical design, on the other hand, has long been the means by which many creationists have decided that there must be a Creator, a Supreme Watchmaker. I'm sure you know all about William Paley and his arguments. Isaac Newton thought of the Creator in terms of making mechanical systems like our solar system, and generations of creationists have followed suit. Of course, on the other side we have folks like Richard Dawkins and his "blind watchmaker" arguments. I'm sure we'll get into that later.
I hope not.
I appreciated your candid expansion on the lack of human comprehension of the technologies I will focus on. I agree that they are not particularly advanced, but I think they are sufficiently advanced for some modest comparisons to be made. Certainly they are more fitting comparisons of the marks of human design than, say, wrapping graphite in wood.
I do not hold that the complexity is irreducible simply because we haven't done so yet. In computer programming, we call the process of deconstructing what is in order to see observe and test exactly how it functions "reverse engineering." Since I am a programmer, I understand the complexities of modular interactions in that field very well. I also agree that the testing phase is the most grueling and frustrating phase of the software development cycle.
AlanF: So development of sophisticated...systems is largely a process of trial and error.
Beautifully put! I used an ellipsis in place of the unecessary qualifier "software." So, in every area of advanced human technology you have identified that a key element of intelligent design when it comes to sophisticated systems is the presence of evidence of trial and error. This may not take as long as I thought.
[+] Intelligence applied to a design process does not eliminate the possibility of getting it wrong. In fact, the presence of "trial and error" would be an indication of intelligent design. We know this from examining known design.
Do we agree on that?
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SixofNine
Two reasons: (1) It's easier to stay in business if you sell products that work (Microsoft being a notable exception); (2) Many designers care greatly about their work and view it as an art form. As such, they want to produce the very best design for the intended purpose that they know how. Anything less would be sloppy, and lousy art.
Sweet! This dovetails nicely with my theory that "God" is actually Franky Skiinvoich, a slovenly, aesthetically challenged loser who lives in a hideously ugly but self-built house he built on unincorporated land just outside of Paris Tx.