Principia

It is well known that IDiots painfully try to avoid answering the charge of either identifying a Designer or elucidating the Designer's methodology in creating life. Usually this is accomplished by claiming that such a question can only be answered via unscientific pursuits (e.g. theology or philosophy) or by pleading that we are too unsophisticated to recreate the advanced techniques of the Designer. Here is a case in point. A CreatoID offers the following image:

And muses rhetorically:
I think it can be a useful exercise to demonstrate a) why this example is a poor analogy to apparent design found in life; and b) how people not even trained in biology, nanotechnology, or biotechnology per se can still devise useful experiments to figure out how to recreate this designed experiment.

Any takers?

PS: Hint: you don't have to be a historian to play this game.

RufusAtticus

Perhaps this analogy would be valid if this "history scholar" was trying to include the "above result" in K-12 history education.

Nic Tamzek

Looks like something being run on a gel to me...

variant 13

I've done a few of them, mine were western blots, though it wasn't that clear.

Damn that JNK and you ERK

I'm confused by this, the result exists because of an experimental method that humans came up with.

theyeti

I'd be happy if teleologists could roughly approximate a telos behind life. Given that they can't even manage that, I don't see why we should expect "design theorists" to be capable of doing anything.

theyeti

Principia

Right. And the question is whether or not we can a) determine how these particular designers made this gel and b) for what purpose this gel was made. Remember this question was asked so as to demonstrate how difficult it is to understand designer methods and motives from merely observing the results.

So let's clear away some rhetorical hurdles set up by this CreatoID. The "result" mentioned above is merely a black-and-white photo. The implication is that the study of life's apparent design is analogous to gazing at photographs and then deriving all of the answers to the questions above. After all, the question was posed with only the picture to analyze. But is the analogy appropriate? Obviously not. Should life be designed, we have much more available to us to attempt at reverse engineering the supposed designer's intent and methods than a mere photograph. In fact, in any scientific pursuit, "getting our hands on" the object of interest is often the first order of business.

Then let's make this exercise more realistic and less restricted. Suppose that we do in fact have access to the object that is being photographed. Yes it is a gel. You know that when it is photographed bands appear. Is that all we can tell about this artifact?

RufusAtticus

Of course we have other photographs of similar features whose origins are known precisely and can be reproduced empirically.

Creationists on the other hand don't have such comparisons to detect the intellegent design they want to be in nature.