Hope for Kansas

[Zuruck]

Behemoth, how bout this...what evidence do you NEED to see in order to refute ID? What would change your mind?

[Kilarin]

If the evidence is so much so that the probability of random chance is almost nothing, then I could be convinced.

I'm not trying to argumentative here, I really am confused about what you mean. This is precisely what ID is attempting to achieve.

Kilarin

[Behemoth]

Behemoth, how bout this...what evidence do you NEED to see in order to refute ID? What would change your mind?

You will not be able to refute ID it's My choice and that's what I happily stick with.

Though if you wanted to prove you're theology any more credible then creation/ID You might wanna serve up some evidence better then false allegations to pigs skulls as being "Early humanoid mutations".

[Lothar]

Actually, what you're doing there is matching a pattern. Or, at least, if you're doing it right all you're doing is matching a pattern. A lot of the discussion in this and other threads has been over what exactly "doing it right" is.

I'm not certain where looking for design is different from pattern matching.

ID involves pattern matching, but it also requires more -- it requires determining that the pattern is:

1) inaccessible to the relevant laws, and
2) not likely to be formed at random, and
3) sufficiently "cool" (I'll explain this below; it basically means we look at the pattern AND other patterns of the same complexity with the same level of meaning. A pattern isn't really "cool" if it, combined with all the other patterns of the same complexity/meaning level, put together aren't very rare.)

We absolutely require inaccessibility in order to even try to make a design inferrence -- if the pattern is built in to the natural laws, then we attribute it to natural laws and move on. If not, then how "not likely" the pattern is, combined with its "coolness", determine how strong of an inference you can make -- it's these two factors *together* that should make up your probability estimate.

Some examples:

1) In the pancake-face example, while you've only ever seen/heard of one pancake with a face on it... if you look at the actual pancake in question, the pattern is not really that unusual for a pancake. It looks kinda vaguely like a face (meaning, it's not super-low probability). Furthermore, the "face" pattern is not all that cool -- while I haven't seen other pancakes with faces on them, I've seen plenty of pancakes with other shapes *just as complicated* on them. While it might be unlikely to get the specific face you see on that pancake, it's not that unlikely to get some meaningful pattern with that level of complexity -- something that looks like a face, an animal, a machine, or something else familiar.

2) If you look up in the sky and see a specific cloud... whatever it is... the chances you'll see another cloud exactly identical to it are extremely low. But, the pattern "it has a bunch of swirls" is not really low probability -- almost all clouds look like that. The specific exact cloud you saw was low probability, but "it has a bunch of swirls like any other cloud" isn't really a cool pattern.

3) The cloud picture I posted above... you instantly look at that and know it's a photochop. Clouds generally form big swirls and such, because the physics of cloud formation tend to lead to swirls. There's nothing in the physics that would tend to lead to something that looks like a lion head, though -- so that pattern is inaccessible to the relevant laws. Furthermore, the pattern "it looks like a lion's head with a lot of detail" is pretty darn low-probability. The pattern is also "cool", in the sense that even if your pattern allowed for any other familiar object except for a cloud -- animal, plant, machine, whatever -- at that level of detail, you *still* wouldn't expect to ever see anything like that in a cloud.

4) The origins of life (where "life" = "self-replicating biological systems"). I don't know of any reason the laws of physics or chemistry would specifically want to create self-replicating systems, so in that sense, the pattern is inaccessible to the relevant laws. Even the most basic life forms are pretty darn complicated, too -- if you take a specific cell, it's not likely that the specific cell you have would be randomly formed. But, how "cool" is the pattern? That is, if you allow for *all* possible self-replicating systems (whether they use DNA, RNA, or something yet unknown), how unlikely is it that you'd ever randomly form any of them? I don't know, and IMO this is where the ID-origins-of-life position is very weak. We don't really have a good handle on what the probabilities are -- we know that a specific cell is unlikely to be formed, but we don't know how unlikely life, in general, is.

The point is:

while ID can be used to figure a probability that something was designed, it cannot prove anything either way

... or, rather, the point is the first part: when you make a design inferrence, what you're really doing is saying something has an extremely high probability of being designed (because there's an extremely low probability of the alternatives, namely, law or chance, forming ANYTHING that matches a pattern that complex and meaningful.)

There's no "proof" in the mathematical sense involved here.

If the evidence is so much so that the probability of random chance is almost nothing, then I could be convinced. That would just remain my opinon, even so. Any opinion wouldn't change the fact that ID cannot prove anything.

Then we pretty much agree. It should be noted, though, that science cannot prove anything either. It's my opinion that the theory of gravity is correct (though it may, perhaps, require small adjustments), and that will remain my opinion until sufficient evidence is gathered to bring that opinion into doubt. But, even though gravity hasn't been *proven*, it's entirely rational to believe in it (and, in fact, irrational NOT to believe in it!)

The same is true for the lion-cloud photochop -- while I can't *prove* that's not a real cloud, it's entirely to rational to believe it's a photochop (or a cloud sculpted by some powerful intelligence), and it's entirely irrational to believe it's just a normal cloud that just *happens* to look like a lion.

My interest in ID is to develop that sort of idea further -- to be able to say, yeah, I have a really solid idea of how exactly to tell that something is intentional.

If some of the statements I've written that you did not choose to comment on are wrong, I'd appreciate it if you told me.

Nothing specific you've said has been wrong, at least nothing I haven't already addressed. What I was getting at is kind of general... at the start of this post, you weren't sure what the difference between ID and pattern-matching was. I doubt *anybody* on this board knew it 3 months ago. But I'm pretty sure *everybody* had an opinion about ID back then.

I think the debate would be a ton friendlier and more interesting if everybody took a few hours to think about ID honestly -- both the "ID-origins" position, and ID as an abstract framework. Far too many people have heard about one or the other and now have a knee-jerk reaction based on the specific case they ran into, and have formed an opinion about all of ID because of a few specific incidents. (This is true both pro and con.) So, far too many people react in a hostile way to anyone who says anything on the "opposite side" (again, pro or con) regardless of the actual merit of the statement being made. But I'll give props to you and the others who've tried to really look at the merit of what's being said.

[Repo Man]

Been away for a few days with school and work; the usual suspects...

You're going way beyond Dr. Behe's analogy. It's not about marketing, and everyone, including Behe, is well aware of the fact that mousetraps are built by intelligent agents and don't naturally reproduce. Behe's claim was that unlike other types of mousetraps which could have a series of useful precursors, the snap mousetrap couldn't. That is the claim that McDonald's mousetraps showed to be wrong, and he also managed to do it in a way that corresponds more closely to natural selection than the transitions to other types of mousetraps that Behe himself proposed.

Just curious, but have you read Darwin's Black Box where Behe presents this argument?

Yes, I read Darwin's Black Box. Have you read Behe's rebuttal to McDonald?

And yes, it is all about marketing--using that as an analogy, of course. If the mousetrap will not work in the real world, then nobody is going to buy it. In biology, if the structure won't work in the real world, then the organism will not live.

That is why there in no evidence, for example, that a partially functioning flagellum has ever existed--because it never existed in the first place. Evolutionists can make up stories of how one might have come about, but it is only that, a story. If one contemplates all the modifications needed to an organism?s genetic code to change it from one that does not have a flagellum into one that does, and then apply the purely random process of mutation as your mechanism for this change, the probability against this happening even once is astronomical. Invoking natural selection does not help the situation since it cannot produce anything new to begin with. That is not science, but myth making.

[Zuruck]

Well there you go Behemoth, the problem with religious people. You could be told and shown that you were wrong and you wouldn't accept it. It's ok, I know ID is your choice, but it's good to know how much you're willing to test your beliefs. For me, Jesus needs to walk on earth in front of me and cure some leper or something. That's what I need.

[Mercury]

Have you read Behe's rebuttal to McDonald?

Yes, and so has McDonald. His updated mousetraps I linked to are in response to Behe's rebuttal where he tried to push the analogy further than he did originally in his book.

And yes, it is all about marketing--using that as an analogy, of course.

Okay, I think I get what you meant better now.

If the mousetrap will not work in the real world, then nobody is going to buy it. In biology, if the structure won't work in the real world, then the organism will not live.

People would not buy the rudimentary mousetraps because better mousetraps exist. We know that mousetraps were designed by humans, and humans do not typically design things incrementally, or at least many of the increments happen in our head before we get a design good enough to build. To follow the analogy, you have to assume that the better mousetraps don't yet exist. (If someone is tempted to say that since McDonald is an intelligent agent the exercise is futile, we're going in circles: the point is to demonstrate how a snap mousetrap has reducible complexity compatible with what natural selection could build, not to demonstrate that mousetraps are alive and reproduce independently.)

And, while you can state that the early traps would not work, I don't see why that would be the case. They would need to be made of strong wire, as has previously been discussed, and their success rate would be lower, but their effectiveness would begin at greater than zero and progressively grow.

That is why there in no evidence, for example, that a partially functioning flagellum has ever existed--because it never existed in the first place.

Back to your marketing comments, other things being equal, why would any bacteria buy a rudimentary flagellum when the present flagellum existed? Natural selection, analogous to market pressures, will favour the more fit structure. We don't know when the flagellum evolved or was built by the designer, but presumably it was a long time ago. Why would the less fit precursors still be in use, especially in something like the flagellum that is not shared over many types of species?

On the other hand, precursors that had a different function do still exist, such as the well-known type III secretion system (TTSS) that shares about a third of the same components in the same arrangement as the flagellum. We can't say for certain that the flagellum evolved from the TTSS or vice versa, but the extreme similarity of a subset of their parts seems to indicate common descent. Most likely they were both preceded by earlier forms that were less complex.

But, you'll probably argue that that's a just-so story and scientists are only assuming it happened that way because of a prior acceptance of common descent and natural selection. In this particular case, to date, that may be so. We don't have the exact evolutionary lineage of the flagellum, charting each mutation along its way to its present form. Chances are we will never have that, though there are other transitions where we have evidence very close to that. We already have evidence that the flagellum is not irreducibly complex, since a subset of its parts serves another function and so could be selected by natural selection. Behe may say that this subset serves a different purpose, and his claim is that there's no intermediates that serve the same purpose, but in doing so he defines IC in a way that does not correspond to what natural selection cannot do. In that case, what's the point of declaring something to be IC?

Anyway, Repo Man, while I disagree with Kilarin and you on this issue, I appreciate the way you present your case. It's refreshing compared to some other approaches. (And since this isn't in the first paragraph of my post, I don't have to worry about anyone taking offense. )

[Samuel Dravis]

ID involves pattern matching, but it also requires more -- it requires determining that the pattern is:

1) inaccessible to the relevant laws, and
2) not likely to be formed at random, and
3) sufficiently "cool" (I'll explain this below; it basically means we look at the pattern AND other patterns of the same complexity with the same level of meaning. A pattern isn't really "cool" if it, combined with all the other patterns of the same complexity/meaning level, put together aren't very rare.)

Ok, I'll restate my point so we don't get confused any more:

ID basically says the more complex-unnatural an object is the more likely that it was made by intelligence. Good.

It's reasonable, as you say, to use it for just that. "It is more likely that such-and-such was made." Good.

My problem is with people that take it to such an extent that they say it proves something, when in fact it cannot prove anything. These are mostly hardcore Christians. Here's an example of how I see it when they try to say something like that:

I've been in another room while Dan and Jan play in the toyroom. I come in and see a nice drawing that wasn't there before. I can assume this didn't just pop into existence because of ID. Now, how to decide which child drew it? I know that Jan has done a lot of similar work before, but none so good as this one. I've never seen Dan actually draw or display any aptitude for doing so, but I've heard that he can.

So who did it? How can you decide? Personally I'd pick the one that I know for certain can do it, or at least something close - Jan.

Now replace Dan with gods/aliens of your choice, and Jan with evolution. Does that change the fact that you can't say who did it with any real certainty? Nope.

IMO, people that say things like that are at best misleading whoever's listening to them, and at worst abusing their trust to just lie outright. That makes me rather angry.

[Behemoth]

Well there you go Behemoth, the problem with religious people. You could be told and shown that you were wrong and you wouldn't accept it. It's ok, I know ID is your choice, but it's good to know how much you're willing to test your beliefs. For me, Jesus needs to walk on earth in front of me and cure some leper or something. That's what I need.

What does that have to do with evolution being a lie?

If it's not prove it, Make something "mutate" to a whole new species in front of me.

[Lothar]

It's reasonable, as you say, to use it for just that. "It is more likely that such-and-such was made." Good.

My problem is with people that take it to such an extent that they say it proves something, when in fact it cannot prove anything.

I agree. I criticize such people pretty extensively.

who did it? How can you decide?

That's part of what the philosophical ID framework seeks to answer. How can you decide? What sort of pattern matching and hypothesis testing do you have to do in order to make a solid decision?

That's also part of what the scientific method seeks to answer... how can you test either hypothesis?

Both are useful. Both are sometimes misused.

[Zuruck]

I didn't say evolution wasn't a lie, I merely asked you what you needed in order to believe it. As with most religious types, you wouldn't believe it anyways. Make god appear in front of me...

[Kilarin]

how to decide which child drew it? I know that Jan has done a lot of similar work before, but none so good as this one. I've never seen Dan actually draw or display any aptitude for doing so, but I've heard that he can.

But this analogy won't really work because both Dan and Jan are intelligent agents. And Intelligent Design attempts to detect that there WAS an intelligent agent involved in the design of some structure, it does not attempt to decide between two or more intelligent agents.

Let's try an analogy that applies EXACTLY. Genetic algorithms in computer programming. Now don't all of you non-programmers go all glassy eyed, this WILL take a bit of explaining, but I'm going to do it at a very simple level.

There are some problems in computer science that we attempt to solve with something we call "genetic algorithms". All that means is that we write programs that evolve.

Say I want a program to predict traffic congestion. We are going to use TWO programs to solve this problem. One will be the "master" program, and the other will be our "genetic algorithm". The master program is the one that makes the genetic algorithm evolve. The genetic algorithm is the program that actually predicts traffic patterns. It's the program that will BE mutated and evolve.

We start with our genetic algorithm as a basic skeleton program that takes in information about the weather, the road conditions, construction, date, concerts and special events, etc., and pops out a report saying where the bad traffic jams will be, and when. Now notice that at this point, our program doesn't really have any insides. It takes in the data, does something fairly random to it, and pops out traffic jam predictions. The predictions our program makes will almost NEVER be right, it's just a sort of random number generator. Also, the data we are feeding into this program is not live, it's old data from months ago. We know what the inputs were, AND we know when and where the traffic jams were on those days. This is important because it means we can measure how successful the program is at predicting traffic jams.

So, to start our master program makes thousands of copies of our genetic algorithm, but each time we make a copy, we make some random CHANGES to the part of the program that looks at the input and decides where the traffic jams will be. Most of the changes will be completely random, some will be more complex, like duplicating a part of the program, and a few will actually copy entire sections of code from other programs. So what is happening inside our genetic algorithm now looks an awful lot like what happens inside cells as they copy themselves, except that we want a very high mutation rate to accelerate the process so our programs mutate a LOT more often than normal cells do.

Now our master program has made thousands of copies of the genetic algorithm, each a bit different. The master program then feeds each copy of the genetic algorithm all the data from last month, what the weather was, where construction was happening, etc. Each copy then spits out a report predicting traffic jams. The master program examines the reports and keeps the 10% of the programs that most closely predicted the actual traffic jams that occurred on those days. The the master program takes those top 10% performers and put them back into the top of the process and makes thousands of copies, again, with random changes (mutations).

Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Over and over and over, with each generation getting a little bit closer to actually predicting traffic jams.

Believe it or not, this process actually works in many cases. Eventually, the computer comes up with a program that predicts traffic jams with some accuracy. No intelligent designer worked out the rules, they evolved, and in a way that often astonishes the original human designers of the genetic algorithm. This process can frequently reveal rules about the subject that the human designers never knew existed.

Now we have the correct background for our analogy, and its time to spin a little story.

---

In a particular university computer lab, they had a grant to run a program just like the one above. And they got some rather spectacular results, the final 100 programs all used very different methods, but all came out with fairly accurate traffic predictions.

BUT, one of the professors involved in the program (Dr. BehDemb), began to have some nagging doubts. COULD he be certain that all of the programs had actually evolved, or was there a chance that any of the undergraduates had tampered with the results. What if some clever and mischievous student (he had one named Joshua in mind), had actually WRITTEN a program, or at least modified one to make it perform better, and then slipped it in with the final results. And if they had, could he prove it? Was there any way to detect if a program had been DESIGNED instead of EVOLVED. Could there be ANY code within one of those programs that he could confidently point to and say the odds of it having been developed randomly were so close to zero that they could be dismissed?

A huge debate ensued. Particularly over one section of code. One of those programs had added a new input. It actually opens a connection to the internet and pulls in traffic data from the highway patrol's web site and uses that information to help it predict the traffic jams. To Dr. BehDemb, this was the smoking gun, because the code required to connect to the internet is not simple, it's pretty complicated, and while the final result gives that particular program a GREAT advantage over the others, any result before that point doesn't give the program any advantage at all, so the master program won't select for it. Dr. BehDemb says that such sections of code are evidence that the program was intelligently designed. The random process could create all kinds of very complicated code, but not THAT kind of complicated code. There was no path to it in the evolutionary process.

But Dr. McDawk, another one of the professors involved in the project, took the other side. He said that even this extremely complicated internet connection could have been developed randomly from parts of the program that had other uses, or was developed in a gradual way and then unnecessary parts were trimmed off to give this final result. He also said that even the attempt to detect design in these programs was a bad idea and certainly not a science.

Now then, it is absolutely true that Dr. BehDemb, and most of the others on his side, are convinced they know who the designer is. They are ready to take their evidence, and Joshua, straight to the school board. There are several people on Dr. BehDemb's side who are so convinced that Joshua tampered with the project that they will take just about anything as evidence of his malfeasance.

But the other side is not innocent of such prejudice either. There are also those in Dr. McDawk's camp who happen to like Joshua quite a bit, and are simply not interested in even listening to whatever evidence the other side has to present. They say that even if you found Joshua's name written into the remarks in the program it wouldn't convince them he had tampered with it. Some of them also argue that Joshua would never have written such sloppy code, and a few that they don't think Joshua was capable of writing the complicated bit.

Unfortunately, both sides spend a lot of time yelling about Joshua and his good and bad points instead of actually dealing with the issue at hand. Because, really, the hunt for the designer is a completely separate issue from the evidence FOR design. Arguments about whether Joshua did it or not really have nothing to do with the evolvability (is that a word?) of the piece of code that connects to the internet. COULD that code have evolved "naturally" through the evolutionary process, or did it require an intelligent agent to write it? Are Dr. BehDemb's attempts to detect design legitimate science, or psuedoscientific garbage? If these design detecting techniques are not good enough to work in this situation, could we apply them in others? And above all, will anyone be able to stop shouting about Joshua long enough so that we can actually study the issue.

Kilarin

[Mercury]

Wow, good post Kilarin.

One incongruity between your analogy and real life is that in the analogy we know something about Joshua and about students in general, and due to this it may be possible to distinguish between a natural selection-like process and what a student programmed. Since we have no idea how the unnamed designer builds his designs, there's no specified differences between how he/she/they/it works and how natural selection works.

Believe it or not, this process actually works in many cases. Eventually, the computer comes up with a program that predicts traffic jams with some accuracy. No intelligent designer worked out the rules, they evolved, and in a way that often astonishes the original human designers of the genetic algorithm. This process can frequently reveal rules about the subject that the human designers never knew existed.

I really appreciate that you didn't undermine the utility of natural selection in order to make your analogy. You've probably read some of the same accounts I have of how natural selection has been mimicked by humans in certain experiments like this with pretty cool results.

Now, maybe the resulting programs could be distinguished from what a student would program -- I think that's quite likely. But wouldn't you agree that the end results of the program do indeed show signs of intelligence? It's not like human intelligence -- no human would design that way -- but couldn't it be like a totally alien kind of intelligence?

And if natural selection can build something that seems intelligent-but-not-our-kind-of-intelligence, then isn't searching for intelligence alone not quite enough?

[Repo Man]

And, while you can state that the early traps would not work, I don't see why that would be the case. They would need to be made of strong wire, as has previously been discussed, and their success rate would be lower, but their effectiveness would begin at greater than zero and progressively grow.

You can?t see why? Try building and marketing one of these fanciful early traps and I?ll sell short on your company stock. Oh yeah, and by the way, mousetraps don't progressivly grow. Sarcasm aside?

Humans, obviously, do not design things incrementally because we need a completed and functioning mechanism to accomplish a specific task. Likewise, nature cannot ?design? things incrementally either because a living organism cannot function with half-working parts. What good is half a flagellum, half a leg, half a wing, half a heart or half an eye? Either they work or they don?t. Partially-working mechanisms are more of a hindrance than a help and would be selected out of nature. Which is exactly why there is no indisputable [edit: spelling correction] evidence of this evolutionary incrementalism to be found anywhere: because it could never exist in the first place.

Waving the magic wand of natural selection creates nothing. Natural selection only works as a mechanism of conservation that sieves-out unfit variants and defective mutants. The raw material on which natural selection is supposed to act is random copying errors (mutations). If evolution from goo to you by way of the zoo were true, we should expect to find countless information-adding mutations. But we have not even found one.

On the other hand, precursors that had a different function do still exist, such as the well-known type III secretion system (TTSS) that shares about a third of the same components in the same arrangement as the flagellum. We can't say for certain that the flagellum evolved from the TTSS or vice versa, but the extreme similarity of a subset of their parts seems to indicate common descent. Most likely they were both preceded by earlier forms that were less complex.

I remember reading an article on the bacterial flagellum and this secretion system by Dr. Scott Minnich, a geneticist and Associate Professor of Microbiology at the University of Idaho. The link I had to it is dead now, otherwise I would include it here. Anyway, his research showed that the flagellum won?t form above 37°C, and instead some secretory organelles form from the same set of genes. But this secretory apparatus is a degeneration from the flagellum which, Minnich says, came first although it is more complex.

We already have evidence that the flagellum is not irreducibly complex, since a subset of its parts serves another function and so could be selected by natural selection. Behe may say that this subset serves a different purpose, and his claim is that there's no intermediates that serve the same purpose, but in doing so he defines IC in a way that does not correspond to what natural selection cannot do. In that case, what's the point of declaring something to be IC?

Actually, what Behe says he means by irreducible complexity is that the flagellum could not work without about 40 protein components all organized in the right way. One-third of the components can be explained by co-option, but the other two-thirds are brand new. Also, the very process of assembly in the right sequence requires other regulatory machines, so is in itself irreducibly complex. Arguing as you do is like claiming that if the components of an electric motor already exist in an electrical shop, they could assemble by themselves into a working motor. However, the right organization is just as important as the right components.

Specified complexity in all cases but biology is used as evidence of design--including the SETI project. For some mysterious reason, biological complexity is the only exception proposed by evolutionists; methinks this smacks of special pleading.

[Kilarin]

Wow, good post Kilarin.

You are too kind, I'm afraid it was probably too long for most folks to finish reading.
But thank you, and I should mention that I always find your posts well thought out and... Funny! And I mean intentionally so. There are others who's posts make me laugh, but I don't think they MEANT to make me laugh.

in the analogy we know something about Joshua and about students in general, and due to this it may be possible to distinguish between a natural selection-like process and what a student programmed. Since we have no idea how the unnamed designer builds his designs, there's no specified differences between how he/she/they/it works and how natural selection works.

Actually, I don't see this as a problem because we do know two important things.
1: We know how the selection process works, and knowing it, we know what it is NOT capable of. It's not capable of predicting or planning ahead.
2: We know something about intelligences in general, and that is that they are capable of planning ahead and predicting. I'm certain experts would use a more complicated explanation, but I think this will do. Any "alien" intelligence that was not capable of planning ahead and predicting would be difficult for us to even define as intelligent, and would not be detected by ID. ID attempts to detect design that involves intelligent predicting and planning. Whether that intelligence is greater than ours, lesser, or extremely different, all we need to detect is that its designs involve predicting and planning ahead, because only intelligence can do that.

But wouldn't you agree that the end results of the program do indeed show signs of intelligence?

They only superficially look intelligent. Once you understand the selection process, close examination should reveal that there was no predicting or planning ahead in the design. Our programs/DNA can only be created by two forces, random chance (as you pointed out to me earlier) and the natural selection process. Random chance by itself is simply not reasonably capable of creating complex specific structures. The odds against the required random chances piling up in the correct order are just too high. Random chance might be able to add one step, perhaps even two, but the odds of going beyond that is so close to zero we can dismiss it. We must rely upon the selection process to keep the good (useful) changes and dispose of the bad. And the selection process is simply not capable of planning ahead or predicting a final outcome. We can not select for any structure unless there is a payoff NOW that the selection process can detect. To switch back to reality, Natural Selection can keep Sickle Cell Anemia around because it increases overall survival NOW. Only random chance could keep around a detrimental trait that won't be advantageous for many generations, and we can can't trust random chance very far. ESPECIALLY when the selection process would be busily trying to dispose of this same trait.

So whether it is our internet connection software or the flagellum. We have to explain how that structure could have ended up in our final result without a designer. Can random chance or the selection process explain it? AND, is it even a legitimate or useful question to ask?

To the first part, could the structure have evolved? Well, I obviously fall on the "NO" side, but I admit that much more research, study and work is required in this area. More research and work on BOTH sides of the debate.

Which brings us to the second part, is this even a valid question to ask?. And on that I don't see how the answer can be anything other than yes.

Kilarin

[Repo Man]

Wow, good post Kilarin.

You are too kind...and I should mention that I always find your posts well thought out and... Funny! And I mean intentionally so.

X2