5 best proofs of evolution

[biohazard]

Hehe, what a classic.

If something is too complex for a man to manufacture, it cannot exist unless someone has designed it. Sheesh. How pathetic is it if the only way you can possibly try to prove the existence of your god is to point out that a bacterium's flagellum is complex. That is sooo last year. Please, find yourself a new proof, this one we've seen already!

Hell, a twelve-gram bacterial cell. Who comes up with this **** in the first place, do you actually understand anything about what you write? Well, luckily at least the references are fresh and up-to-date.

[robsabba]

Intelligent Design

We know that design necessitates a designer. In fact, in accordance with this fundamental axiom, design detection methodology is a prerequisite in many fields of human endeavor, including archaeology, anthropology, forensics, criminal jurisprudence, copyright law, patent law, reverse engineering, crypto analysis, random number generation, and SETI. And how do we recognize intelligent design? In general, we find "specified complexity" to be a reliable indicator of the presence of intelligent design. Chance can explain complexity alone but not specification -- a random sequence of letters is complex but not specified (it's meaningless).)

It depends on what you mean by "design." Snowflakes certainly look designed... each is both complex and unique. Are they evidence of a snowflake designer?

Specified Complexity is a Red Herring. We cannot tell if for example, The Elephant is the result of a Specified Design by looking at it. Was the Elephant the Intended result of a designer, or one of many possible results of evolution?

So where's the proof of God's existence? In accordance with our familiar axiom and in light of the tremendous advances we've made in molecular biology, biochemistry, genetics and information theory, the proof of God is all around us!

Such fields have instead taken much out of the mystery of Life which used to be included under theology. Just as we now understand where lightning comes from (not Zeus) we also now understand much more about where babies come from.

When we apply the general principles of detecting specified complexity to biologic systems (living creatures), we find it reasonable to infer the presence intelligent design. Take, for example, the bacterial flagellum's stator, rotor, drive-shaft, U-joint, and propeller. It is not convenient that we've given these parts these names - that's truly their function. If you were to find a stator, rotor, drive-shaft, U-joint, or propeller in any vehicle, machine, toy or model, you would recognize them as the product of an intelligent source. No one would expect an outboard motor -- much less one as incredible as the flagellar motor -- to be the product of a chance assemblage of parts. Motors are the product of intelligent design.

We are not talking about a"chance assembly of parts," we are talking about evolution, which means Selection.

Furthermore, the E. coli bacterial flagellum simply could not have evolved gradually over time. The bacterial flagellum is an "irreducibly complex" system. An irreducibly complex system is one composed of multiple parts, all of which are necessary for the system to function. If you remove any one part, the entire system will fail to function. Every individual part is integral. There is absolutely no naturalistic, gradual, evolutionary explanation for the bacterial flagellum. (Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, 1996.)

Strange then that neither Behe nor any other IDer has been able to show that any Specific flagellum is, indeed, I.C. Behe only talks about these devices in general terms, yet his whole point is supposed to be about how these things are IC at the molecular level of detail. Anything that is IC can be explained by evolutionary exaption, in any case. The IC argument assumes that parts remain the same over time and never change their function. It also assumes that parts were not lost (as in scaffolding). This is not how evolution is believed to work.

The bacterial flagellum (not to mention the irreducibly complex molecular machines responsible for the flagellum's assembly) is just one example of the specified complexity that pervades the microscopic biological world. Molecular biologist Michael Denton wrote, "Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 grams, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world." (Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 1986, p. 250.)

Denton now thinks that evolution is responsible for all this, but was guided by an unfolding plan from God. See: Nature's Destiny (1998)

[MrMistery]

A question i always like to ask to mess with ID proponents is this: if you have a designer that is smart enough to design everything, wouldn't this designer be irreducibly complex? How on earth did the designer appear? was there some designer of the designer?