Daggah

"Not exactly perfect" is an understatement. Every one of Behe's specific claims have been shown to be wrong.

Secular Pinoy

My understanding is that there are real irreducibly complex systems and structures in the natural world. That is, in their current state, they are so finely-tuned, each part so well meshed that if one part is missing, the entire system or structure would never work, or it would just break down. I believe Ken Miller said something to that effect in his video that was posted in this board a while back (though my memory is hazy and I could be wrong).

The thing is, before this IC system reached its current form, it must have formed from earlier systems which were clunky and haphazardly built, and could have been the product of evolution. The problem is not "if" IC systems exists, but if there is any possible pathway for that system or structure to evolve from. And I believe that there is such a pathway for every system that is irreducibly complex. Try a search at the Pub Med website.

Secular Pinoy

What's wrong with his tshirt? I think its cool, in an odd hippie-meets-star-trek kind of way. I don't mind getting a complimentary tshirt, Thia. In fact, make it two, a x-large one for me, and a body hugging medium for my girlfriend (she got nice jugs!).

~Edited typo~

[ August 02, 2002: Message edited by: Secular Pinoy ]</p>

Doubting Didymus

Hello.

I just thought I'd bump this thread up, because the site I tried to link to earlier, <a href="http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html" target="_blank">"A reducibly complex mousetrap"</a>, has come back up.

This website is the perfect example of how evolution can explain the presence of irreducible complexity. Behe bases his entire argument on the assumtion that things that stop when you take something away can not be explained by gradual evolution. His example is the mousetrap. This website, by giving a possible evolutionary explanation of the mousetrap, blows that assumption right out of the water.

GeoTheo

On an emotional level,I personally think YEC has more going for it than ID. But once you compile all of the evidence, the case for YEC vanishes. Despite it's emotional appeal it is untenable in light of the ovewhelming evidence in broad independant areas of scientific inquiry. So I went straight to accepting evolution and skipped ID altogether.
I would rather believe God created through evolution than belive he is a bit of a retard in how he creates. If the Intelligent Designer exists
he sure is a hard worker, and needs to be, because he doesn't have the smarts to get things right the first time.
As far as Behe's belief, as to how irreducable complexity got here, he believes it was all programmed into the DNA of the first cell. He says all the genes for ALL irreducably complex systems were found there for ALL the organisms that would evolve in the future, but that they were turned off. Not only that but that they remained turned off for generations until they were needed.
This is preposterous because lab expiriments show that when genes are turned off, after a few generations they get unrecognizably garbled by mutations because there is no way for them to be sorted by natural selection if they are not expressed.
If this "super cell" ever existed it would never have retained the DNA information to produce all the complex systems he says it is responsible for.
He seems to say in his book that he thinks he is responsible for one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all times. I not only disagree, I think all he is doing is making it harder for the proper teaching of evolution in public education. See Newsweek, or maybe US News there is an article about ID proponents trying to get into the Schools. It is my hope that evolution will eventually become accepted by the US public as well as the Church.

Kosh

That goes without saying, since "godidit" is irreducibly complex...