Oolon Colluphid

It pains me to have to ask you this again, but just how the blue buggery does the fall account for the design intricacies of parasites and their lifecycles? If you want intelligent design, then either god did design these things (and hance is a repugnant sadist), or you are crediting the fall with design abilities. I asked you to explain that earlier, and you ignored it.

TTFN, Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

I’d say yes, even if the ‘purpose’ is merely art. Its point could be simply to be decorative, or interesting, or even just because god went ‘oh why not?’ I’d have thought that by definition, if something is designed, the designer has some reason for it, no matter how irrational or wacky the reason. True randomness is by definition not ‘design’. Unless it’s designed to be random... in which case, what advantage is there in including god in the explanation? Occam’s razor cuts him out.

Gonads. It is not, at least as far as biological entities are concerned, and things like star clusters don’t seem to require designing.

And the ‘art’ involved in the path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve? The intelligent design behind the extensor coccygis muscle (which not even everyone has)? You are trying to have it both ways. You’re arguing that intelligence is what accounts for ‘good’ design, and some nebulous ‘art’ (aka no sign of intelligence) accounts for anything else. But putting poor designs down to art is ad hoc, irrefutable, and superfluous. Functionless eyes on creatures that don’t need eyes doesn’t look like art, it looks like design constrained by history.

No, the whole concept of intelligent design is plain wrong, whether the purposes are biblical or ‘other’. Intelligence was simply not involved in forming biological things (ie the stuff for which it is normally invoked); selection of randomly-occurring variation was. You may or may not be an atheist; you most certainly appear to be an evolution-denier. That is, someone clueless about biology. Evolution is a fact (rolls eyes, waits for the ‘only a theory’ line...); intelligent design explains nothing.

Thus, an irrefutable hypothesis, which has no place in science. Evidence for your claim: anything you want. Evidence against: none possible, it’s just ‘art’, it’s just how god wanted it for his own, unfathomable-by-us reason. IOW, same old creationist claptrap. Feel free to continue with such autoproctology if you wish, just don’t expect us to give it any credence.

A more plausible explanation is the one we already have: that blind forces of nature can lead in certain circumstances to complexity and ‘designoid’ objects such as living things.

With science, god is neither denied nor required, he is simply superfluous. As an ‘atheist’, you should know this, and not be pushing this quasi-creationist guano. Even if it is only ‘for the sake of argument’. Your argument is pointless.

TTFN, Oolon

GPLindsey

Oolon,
You've stumped me as far as how I could prove that I am an atheist on a message board. I hope these suffice:

I think that --
There is no God.
There is no afterlife.
Dr. Who is the only deity I recognize.

As for design, I'm thinking that there are real world examples out there where you can have something that is the product of intelligent design but without a purpose per se. Every manufacturing process, for example, typically produces an end product and a variety of waste and scrap material. Was the waste and scrap the product of intelligent design? Well, yes, in that it was created by an intelligence and did not come about through natural means. Was the designer's purpose to create the waste and scrap? No.

Supporters of ID in the schools think of it as the camel's nose under the tent--just get an acknowledgement that it is feasible and on par with evolution, and then it is a short walk to Christianity. However, they don't realize how easily it will be for cranks like me and others to come up with a host of strange scenarios to explain intelligent design without turning to the Bible. For example:
-- the designer is just an artist who was following her bliss, and there still is no greater purpose to the universe other than to look at it;
--the designer was a confused, Rube Goldberg-like blunderer, who passed away eons ago, and now his contraption is expanding into nothingness;
--there is in fact a designer for every particle in the universe, and an immense supernatural bureaucracy of Departments, agencies, and task forces actually guide the destiny of the universe; or
--God is an idiot savant (bow to DMB) and universes are just his special gift!

scigirl

Oolon said, "And the ‘art’ involved in the path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve?"

Hey I just dissected that nerve yesterday!

scigirl

scigirl

Haha!

But wait a minute - a lot of the biological 'scrap metal' has evidence of how it was "created" by evolution - and needs no supernatural explanation. Pseudogenes, for example, leave evidence of how they were "created" (usually by non-homologous recombination). Here's an analogy I used once, in
<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000920&p=2" target="_blank">this thread</a>, when Douglas kept saying that similarities in primate chromosomes were due to a common designer:

All right, I'll play the robot game. Let's say we are watching a junkyard wars marathon, and we tune in to find the following robot had been constructed:
1. A robot with a one-piece arm. This part had a hook on it that attached it to the main frame, and also had a characteristic blemish on it--say, a big red stain.

Now, let's say that the old creations get left in the junkyard, and can be used in future shows.

Next week we find this robot:

2. This robot is much different from last week's robot. The arm is composed of two pieces this time. The piece that attaches to the main frame (the "upper arm) has a different hook from the first robot arm. But then we notice that there's a piece that was welded by the team to the upper arm (i.e. the "forearm) that, strangely enough, looks just like the main arm from the first robot. In fact, the hook is still there, but is not hooking to anything. Also, this forearm has the same red stain, and is the same size.

Would you conclude the following?

A. The junkyard wars team constructed the second robot arm from scratch, they stuck a hook on the forearm even though it wasn't hooking to anything, and also put a red stain on it.

B. The team found the first robot in the junkyard, took the arm, and stuck it on their new robot?

That, I believe is a better analogy. Robot A's arm represents one of the chimp chromosomes (how about 2q), robot B's arm represents human chromosome 2. A piece of chromosome 2 looks just like 2q - same size, same blemishes, same non-functioning hook (at least it looks non-functional). The centromere does actually function as a hook--the microtubules attach to it to pull chromosomes apart during meiosis and mitosis. Chromosomes only need one. We have not observed any known function for the extra centromere in the human chromosome, but yet, there it is, looking just like the centromere from 2q, blemishes and all.

scigirl

pz

Well? Wasn't it beautiful?

Oolon Colluphid

Most people do it in what they say, claim and argue for/against, rather than mere assertions. Off-hand, I don't recall any Infidel regular simply stating their atheism (except in answer to specific threads on such things). They don’t usually do it by arguing for intelligent design.

Good enough!

Fine, but irrelevant

Ah, now you're talking my language! Though that's a bit unfair on the rest of Gallifrey, don't you think? Surely what you've got there is polytheism!

Okay, fair enough, if you say so . In which case, don't you see why we're bewildered by your references to ID? If there's no god, who/what/where is this intelligence that allegedly did the designing, and why are you apparently promoting it?

Maybe you’ve come to the wrong place: most people here don’t believe in any sort of creator, so arguing that things could be explained by a different sort of one cuts no ice. Maybe try it out on some Christians?

But as Scigirl has pointed out, we usually have good ideas about the evolutionary history of 'design' irrelevancies. With evolution, a structure can be reduced but not necessarily be lost entirely, if it is no longer required, it just needs to be reduced till it is no longer a hindrance (ie till it becomes invisible to selection).

Here’s a couple of examples.

We humans have muscles that let some people wiggle their ears. This seems pretty pointless design. Yet these same post-auricular muscles are the ones that in many other mammals move the ears to point towards sounds. The evolutionary answer is that our ancestors way back used to be able to move theirs too.

And, foetal teeth in mammals that don’t have teeth, such as baleen whales and anteaters. These are formed in the foetus, and then reabsorbed. Pointless design... and a sign of evolutionary history (the default setting for mammals being to have teeth).

Evolution, you see, explains both good design and poor design. Evolution works by modifying embryological processes; designs are constrained by history, by the starting place. Hence pythons and some whales have bits of pelvis. They no longer need them, but as long as making them (according to the genetic recipe) doesn’t cost anything significant, the genes won’t be turned off or lost through selection.

Ah, but there’s the rub. With biological ‘design’, the waste is incorporated in the end product. A good designer, let alone an omniscient one, would minimise the scrap. And more relevantly, he would not use more materials than necessary (eg the recurrent laryngeal). Nor would he produce needlessly convoluted design. Manufacturing researcher and consultant Terry Hill, in his ‘Manufacturing Strategy’, pointed out that “any third-rate engineer can design complexity”; the hallmark of truly intelligent design is not complexity, but rather simplicity. Specifically, it is the ability to take a complex process or product spec and create the least complicated design that will meet all project parameters. Ask any engineer; they’ll tell you that that is perfectly sensible and reasonable. Yet this sort of scrap is what we find in nature. See <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000801&p=" target="_blank">this thread</a> for more examples of the sort of thing that the designer allowed into the end products.

Also, “Was the designer's purpose to create the waste and scrap? No.” But the sorts of things we’re talking about are the muscles mentioned above. We ‘know’ he created muscles, we ‘know’ he usually put them in useful places. If the coccyx was designed to support rectal muscles, what was the creator up to putting a muscle on it that would move it... if it could move? This is design constrained by history, or plain stupid design by the creator.

In other words, if the designer is evolution, we would expect such things, because it is not an intelligent designer, it is a ‘blind watchmaker’.

Sure, sure. But what use are these hypotheses? Without evidence for the designer’s mere existence, it is superfluous. We simply don’t need to posit a designer. Occam’s razor cuts it out.

David Deutsch in Fabric of Reality usefully refines Occam’s Razor: he says don’t multiply entities in your explanation beyond necessity (basic OR), because if you do, those entities will themselves require explanation. We get the most satisfactory explanations by explaining stuff in terms of what’s already know. Idiot savant creators are one hell of an unknown, and so undermine the explanatory power of the hypothesis. Especially since evidence for it is rather scarce.

So yes, “cranks like you” ( ) can suggest whatever you like. Things could have been created by such a creator. But we just don’t need use that explanation, there’s no evidence suggesting we should, and to do so produces less of an explanation than we have already. As someone has said, to explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is lunacy.

So sorry to spoil your fun, but as I said before, these speculations are autoproctology. They are angels on pinheads. They are: pointless.

Cheers, Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

Excellent! I take it it went under the aorta?

Say, if it’s not too late, any way you could get a picture or two of it? There’s none I can find that show it fully, and it would be very useful!

Cheers, Oolon