Top Science Journal admits Darwin is wrong

[117938Aa]

I did not have enough space in my title to announce exactly the essence of what Phillip Ball admitted in his article in Nature Magazine. What he said was that scientists do not understand how natural selection is responsible for all the variety of species. This is what Intelligent Design advocates have been claiming ever since the Whistar Conference in 1967 when mathematicians told biologists quite bluntly that mathematics refutes Darwinian theory. Since evolutionary theory is so profoundly misunderstood let’s review exactly what it is. Darwinism is 5 theses bundled up into one theory, some true, some false:

1. Species change over time - true (scorpions used to be 8 foot tall)
2. All species share a common ancestor - false (there are 16 different types of genomes
   ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/ta … =cgencodes
   that could not evolve one from the other without the organism destroying itself. However, since the Cambrian Explosion I personally believe that all animals had a parent for the simple reason that it is too hard for a multi-celled organism not to have a parent. There are about 40 phyla and they all arose at the same time during the Cambria and they do not share a common ancestor. Further, non-Christian ID advocates like me do not care about common ancestry, we care about teleology).
3. The strong survive. True, but this is trivial. The strong by definition survive. The strong are those who reproduce and those who survive are those who survive long enough to reproduce, hence the strong survive is a clever rewording of the tautological: those who reproduce reproduce.
4. All mutations are random. False. Mathematics has adequately demonstrated that all mutations are not random.
5. Natural Selection and genetic drift acting on random mutations explain ALL the diversity of species. False, for reasons listed in 4, all mutations are not random.

Finally, we might as well state up front my alternative to Darwinism.

• Mutations are due to purposeful intentions of the genome by the organism’s subconscious. The subconscious can regulate the body, therefore it can regulate and manipulate the genome.

Now, let’s look at what Philipp Ball actually said. First, Ball has to be careful for not being too heretical. If he criticizes Darwinian theory too much he will be exiled to the lunatic fringe, his coworkers will literally refuse to talk to him at work and he will have a difficult time getting funding. All this has been well documented and substantiated by the ID movement. Second, what you do if you’re a careful scientist and you know that a sacred orthodoxy is obviously false is you use the Goldilocks principle: not too heretical but heretical enough so that you reform an obviously false orthodoxy.

Now, let’s look at what he actually said:

Michael Lynch has also shown that rather than enhancing fitness, natural selection can generate a redundant accumulation of molecular ‘defences’, such as systems that detect folding problems in proteins. At best, this is burdensome. At worst, it can be catastrophic. In short, the current picture of how and where evolution operates, and how this shapes genomes, is something of a mess.

That’s pretty much a career-killer right there. He’s got to do something to show that he’s not a lunatic, so he writes:

That should not be a criticism, but rather a vote of confidence in the healthy, dynamic state of molecular and evolutionary biology. … Evolutionary theory does not help biologists to predict what kinds of genetic network they should expect to see in any one context.

He then goes on to admit that we really don’t know how species change:

Instead of occasional, muted confessions from genomics boosters and popularizers of evolution that the story has turned out to be a little more complex, there should be a bolder admission — indeed a celebration — of the known unknowns. … According to evolutionary biologist Patrick Phillips at the University of Oregon in Eugene, projects such as ENCODE are showing scientists that they don’t really understand how genotypes map to pheno-types, or how exactly evolutionary forces shape any given genome.

Finally, some other quotes that are quite revealing:

Many differently structured gene networks might result in the same trait or phenotype. Also, new phenotypes that are viable and potentially superior may be more likely to emerge through tweaks to regulatory networks than through more risky alterations to protein-coding sequences. In a sense this is still natural selection pulling out the best from a bunch of random mutations, but not at the level of the DNA sequence itself. … Barely a whisper of this vibrant debate reaches the public. Take evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ description in Prospect magazine last year of the gene as a replicator with “its own unique status as a unit of Darwinian selection”. It conjures up the decades-old picture of a little, autonomous stretch of DNA intent on getting itself copied, with no hint that selection operates at all levels of the biological hierarchy, including at the supraorganismal level, or that the very idea of gene’ has become problematic. … When the structure of DNA was first deduced, it seemed to supply the final part of a beautiful puzzle, the solution for which began with Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel. The simplicity of that picture has proved too alluring. For the jubilee, we should do DNA a favour and lift some of the awesome responsibility for life’s complexity from its shoulders.

I have uploaded the original article for those who are interested.

docs.google.com/file/d/0B9zzW6- … sp=sharing

[phyllo]

This is what Intelligent Design advocates have been claiming ever since the Whistar Conference in 1967 when mathematicians told biologists quite bluntly that mathematics refutes Darwinian theory.

4. All mutations are random. False. Mathematics has adequately demonstrated that all mutations are not random.

This is what Stanislaw Ulam had to say in 1970 about the presentation at Wistar:

In this report, we shall present an abbreviated account of calculations performed by us in the mid 1960’s. These calculations were preliminary and intended merely as the zeroth approximation to the problem concerning rates of evolution-a process which we have here severely stylized and enormously oversimplified. A mention of the results of such calculations in progress at that time was made at a meeting in 1966 at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia by one of us. The discussion there, as reported in the proceedings of the meeting, was rather frequently misunderstood and the impression might have been left that the results somehow make it extremely improbable that the standard version of the survival-of-the-fittest mechanism leads to much too slow a progress. What was really intended was indications from our computations-simple minded as they were-that a process involving only mitosis, in absence of sexual reproduction, would be indeed much too slow. However, and most biologists realize it anyway, the Darwinian mechanism together with mixing of genes accelerate enormously the rate of acquiring new “favorable” characteristics and leave the possibility of sufficiency of the orthodox ideas quite open. Numerous requests addressed to us for the elucidations and details of the numerical setup made us decide to give this account of our computations.

Source of the above quote, links and more discussion is here:
pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/02 … ski-1.html

[statiktech]

there are 16 different types of genomes that could not evolve one from the other without the organism destroying itself.

Why not?

• Mutations are due to purposeful intentions of the genome by the organism’s subconscious. The subconscious can regulate the body, therefore it can regulate and manipulate the genome.

Are you saying that the subconscious somehow passes intentionality to the genome [meaning the genome actually intends to change], or that the subconscious can intentionally change the genome? Either way it seems like you’re saying that the basic mechanism for genetic variation is consciousness. Do you have any evidence to support that claim?

[Mr_Reasonable]

I don’t know why people try so hard to make religion look like science. It doesn’t make any sense and it only sways the ignorant.

[PhysBang]

@117938Aa

I did not have enough space in my title to announce exactly the essence of what Phillip Ball admitted in his article in Nature Magazine. What he said was that scientists do not understand how natural selection is responsible for all the variety of species. This is what Intelligent Design advocates have been claiming ever since the Whistar Conference in 1967 when mathematicians told biologists quite bluntly that mathematics refutes Darwinian theory. Since evolutionary theory is so profoundly misunderstood let’s review exactly what it is. Darwinism is 5 theses bundled up into one theory, some true, some false:

Ah, yes, I love how people like to cherry-pick particular things like the Wistar conference out of context while not bothering to learn any actual science.

1. Species change over time - true (scorpions used to be 8 foot tall)

Fail. Not scorpions, one type of seas scorpion. Different kind of animal. Good research so far.

2. All species share a common ancestor - false (there are 16 different types of genomes
   ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/ta … =cgencodes
   that could not evolve one from the other without the organism destroying itself.

And you have evidence for this? Evidence that the entire scientific community lacks?

3. The strong survive. True, but this is trivial. The strong by definition survive. The strong are those who reproduce and those who survive are those who survive long enough to reproduce, hence the strong survive is a clever rewording of the tautological: those who reproduce reproduce.

Fail. Evolutionary theory never claimed that the strong survive. The fittest survive.

4. All mutations are random. False. Mathematics has adequately demonstrated that all mutations are not random.

Again, what evidence do you have that everyone else in the world lacks?

Finally, we might as well state up front my alternative to Darwinism.

• Mutations are due to purposeful intentions of the genome by the organism’s subconscious. The subconscious can regulate the body, therefore it can regulate and manipulate the genome.

OK, how do we test this?

Now, let’s look at what Philipp Ball actually said. First, Ball has to be careful for not being too heretical. If he criticizes Darwinian theory too much he will be exiled to the lunatic fringe, his coworkers will literally refuse to talk to him at work and he will have a difficult time getting funding. All this has been well documented and substantiated by the ID movement.

But the ID movement has a lot of funding. Strangely, they never do any experiments…

Instead of occasional, muted confessions from genomics boosters and popularizers of evolution that the story has turned out to be a little more complex, there should be a bolder admission — indeed a celebration — of the known unknowns. … According to evolutionary biologist Patrick Phillips at the University of Oregon in Eugene, projects such as ENCODE are showing scientists that they don’t really understand how genotypes map to pheno-types, or how exactly evolutionary forces shape any given genome.

This is not new to many biologists and it has essentially zero to do with disproving evolutionary theory or claiming that Darwin was wrong.

And what is the strange hang-up with teleology? It’s like, not being happy that there is not yet a way to directly explain human consciousness with physical biology, one wants instead to imagine that there is some essentially mysterious other thing that can never be explained.

[117938Aa]

@PhysBang

Ah, yes, I love how people like to cherry-pick particular things like the Wistar conference out of context while not bothering to learn any actual science.

This is simply an ad hominem circumstantial and hence a fallacy. You’re saying that I’m in the circumstance of not doing any science.

1. Species change over time - true (scorpions used to be 8 foot tall)

Fail. Not scorpions, one type of seas scorpion. Different kind of animal. Good research so far.

We’re in agreement.

2. All species share a common ancestor - false (there are 16 different types of genomes
   ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/ta … =cgencodes
   that could not evolve one from the other without the organism destroying itself.

And you have evidence for this? Evidence that the entire scientific community lacks?

The link is the evidence. It take proteins to make DNA and DNA to make proteins. The whole thing has to be set up all at once. In order to get protein to make a whole new translation system requires a whole new set of proteins but it’s DNA that makes the protein.

3. The strong survive. True, but this is trivial. The strong by definition survive. The strong are those who reproduce and those who survive are those who survive long enough to reproduce, hence the strong survive is a clever rewording of the tautological: those who reproduce reproduce.

Fail. Evolutionary theory never claimed that the strong survive. The fittest survive.

4. All mutations are random. False. Mathematics has adequately demonstrated that all mutations are not random.

Again, what evidence do you have that everyone else in the world lacks?

Certainly, the Darwinists do not have any mathematical evidence that NS acting on RM is responsible for all the variety of species. For mathematical evidence that Darwinism William Dembski lays it out for us.

@Dembski

An irreducibly complex system is a discrete combinatorial object. Probabilities therefore naturally arise and attach to such objects. Such objects are invariably composed of building blocks. Moreover, these building blocks need to be converge on some location. Finally, once at this location the building blocks need to be configured to form the object. It follows that the probability of obtaining an irreducibly complex system is the probability of originating the building blocks required for the system, multiplied times the probability of locating them in one place once the building blocks are given, multiplied times the probability of configuring them once the building blocks are given and located in one place. We therefore have three probabilities that figure into the probability of a discrete combinatorial object: porig the probability of originating the building blocks for that object; pbi the probability of locating the building blocks in one place once they are given; pconfig the probability of configuring the building blocks once they are given and in one place. Let us call the first of these the origination probability, the second the localization probability, and the third the configuration probability. It follows that the probability of a discrete combinatorial object equals the product of these three probabilities=

the probability of getting a single representative of each of the right proteins for a flagellum together in one spot would be the probability of going through the supermarket and getting each of the right ingredients for the cake into your shopping cart. Again the probability is 1066. Actually, it is even smaller than this because the “supermarket” of proteins in E. coli contains even more items (i.e., 4,289) than the 4,000 in the cake example, thus permitting even more interfering cross-reactions and lowering the probability even more.=

the filament that serves as the propeller for the flagellum makes up over 90 percent of the flagellum’s mass and is comprised of more than 20,000 subunits of flagellin protein (FliC). That means going to E. coil’s “protein supermarket” and picking 20,000 items of flagellin off the shelf. The three ring proteins (Flgh, I, and F) are present in about 26 subunits each. The proximal rod requires 6 subunits, FliE 9 subunits, and FliP about 5 subunits. The distal rod consists of about 25 subunits. The hook (or U-joint) consists of about 130 subunits of FlgE.
Let us therefore assume that 5 copies of each of the 50 proteins required to construct E. cofc’s flagellum are required for a functioning flagellum (this is extremely conservative—all the numbers above were at least that and some far exceeded it, for example, the 20,000 subunits of flagellin protein in the filament). We have already assumed that each of these proteins permits 10 interchangeable proteins. That corresponds to 500 proteins in E. coWs “protein supermarket” that could legitimately go into a flagellum. By randomly selecting proteins from E. coifs “protein supermarket,” we need to get 5 copies of each of the 50 required proteins or a total of 250 proteins. Moreover, since each of the 50 required proteins has by assumption 10 interchangeable alternates, there are 500 proteins in E. coli from which these 250 can be drawn. But those 500 reside within a “protein supermarket” of 4,289 proteins. Randomly picking 250 proteins and having them all
fall among those 500 therefore has probability (500(4,289)250, which has order of magnitude 10^234 and falls considerably below the universal probability bound of 10^150 … Although the flagellum requires about 50 separate proteins for its construction, in its final form it utilizes only about 30 proteins (corresponding to the 30 character types—alphabetic and punctuation—required to express the Gettysburg Address). We can think of the remaining 20 proteins as scaffolding that falls away. Also, many more individual protein subunits constitute a flagellum than the 1,000 or so sequenced characters that make up the Gettysburg Address. Finally, a perturbation tolerance factor of 10 percent and a perturbation identity factor of 20 percent seem quite conservative for the flagellum (i.e., the perturbation tolerance factor is likely to be much smaller and the perturbation identity factor is likely to be much bigger).

Computer source codes, mechanical devices, and architectural edifices in general have much lower perturbation tolerance factors than apply to texts intended for human interpreters.=

10^288, can reasonably be taken as an upper bound on the perturbation probability for the bacterial flagellum.

a quick and dirty approximation of Ppcmnb is therefore 30^2,000 or on the order of 10^2954.

Finally, we might as well state up front my alternative to Darwinism.

• Mutations are due to purposeful intentions of the genome by the organism’s subconscious. The subconscious can regulate the body, therefore it can regulate and manipulate the genome.

OK, how do we test this?

There are three types of motion: law, chance and design. Law cannot produce a complex genome, all four letters of the genome are the same. Law works in an input/output relationship. If the genome were built by law we would see patterns in the genome. AGTCAGTCAGTC over and over again. Now, of course a lot of the genome is repetitive, but the point is ALL of it is had to be repetitive. The rule out chance we refer to mathematics above. Design is the only plausible explanation. We test design by ruling out chance and law.

This is not new to many biologists and it has essentially zero to do with disproving evolutionary theory or claiming that Darwin was wrong. And what is the strange hang-up with teleology? It’s like, not being happy that there is not yet a way to directly explain human consciousness with physical biology, one wants instead to imagine that there is some essentially mysterious other thing that can never be explained.

[/quote]
These are mere statements on belief. I don’t see an argument here other than a dislike for teleology.

But the ID movement has a lot of funding. Strangely, they never do any experiments…

We now have 50 peer reviewed articles published.
discovery.org/a/2640
Read them if you’re interested in learning about our wonderful experiments. Douglas Axe has the biologic institute
biologicinstitute.org/
and him and Anne Gauger every day are studying biology and falsifying Darwinism in the process.

Let’s get one thing straight about Darwinism. If NS acting on RM explained anything then it would explain how one protein evolves into another. I challenge you to name me just one father protein, then name its two child proteins which are more than 20 amino acides different then inform me how NS acting on RM forced that change from the father protein into the two child proteins. There are about a billion to a trillion different proteins existing on Earth and Darwin’s wonderful theory has not explained how any protein more than 20 amino acids different from its sibling protein evolved due to NS. And several proteins are more than 1000 amino acids long, some of them even 27,000 amino acids long. This theory hasn’t explained anything and somehow it managed to become orthodoxy.

[The_Golden_Turd]

I don’t think either a Darwin oriented Evolutionsry theory or ID crumbles under all life orienting from a single ancestor, or spawned here and there.

It’s always bothered me as to how very, very, very, very difficult if is for life to spontaneous arise, it should resemble more a shake and bake situation, and it should always be happening by the default that Earth clearly has the ingredients for life… under either theory. Yeah, God made life… just like he made the soil, but we can still witness volcanoes pumping new soil and air. We don’t see life spontaneously arising… and the best we can manage is really bad myths of lightening hitting a mud puddle, or other comedic scenarios worthy of the opening lines of a ancient work on philosophy.

I think on the long term, the current culture within Evolutionary Genetics is utterly fucked, the abuse and bias against religious theorists is paralleled to Colonial Discrimination by Europeans on Native scientists performing tests by western standards.

When I visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky, I was really disgusted and pissed, putting velociraptors in the garden of Eden was too much for me, and seeing Mennonite boys smirking with a evil twist at the displays was equally discomforting. That was never in Christianity, and the desire for a alternative caused that retarded rouse to appear.

However, outside across the lake, their work at hybrid genetics was legit, growing up I wanted to be a Anthropologist, and read every book I could on DNA… I saw nothing out of the norm there, and it caused me to think long term about who ultimately will dominate genetics… It’s not going to be city people, but the country side, who’s farmers want that purer and superior breed, clones, and resurrecting dead life stalk that were profitable.

If Intelligent Design theorist begin to shift their emphasis to genetics via animal husbandry and the department of agriculture…the current culture in the universities will be irreversibly checked, as they will essentially loose dictorial control over what ideas are acceptable, and what is not. It would be easy to establish training institutions then, and if they offer forensic courses for law enforcement, it would pretty much be the end for the university dominance, and a wider range of discourse would be possible without fears of ostracism and lost employment.

It comes down to simple economics- which population has a greater interest in genetics, city dwellers or the rural population? Which is more religious? Which will dominate the field long term?

Also… Christianity is rich in metaphors used in animal husbandry, as well as causality based material dualism. Does anyone honestly think Darwinism can tank a religion with this background, or are we currently witnessing the population parameters for people attracted to the theory. Are there underlining cultural reasons for these groups to be attracted more tithe formatting of the logic and presentation than the theory itself persay? Similar to how people are attracted to rock music, but there are Christian alternatives using similar appealing metrics?

We don’t ask ourselves about how evolutionary theory evolved, who’s actively pushing it and why, as well as populations seemingly opposed to it yet embracing aspects of it… it’s a crucial angle to the Darwinist vs ID debate, and I never see it talked about.

By the way, Im Catholic, and naturally sit in neutral ground, both camps are attractive to me, just the dead lock is a embarrassment for science, showing extreme prejudice, while the other is going overboard in trying to match their religion to current theories, which isn’t necessary- inventive rhetoric can cause many verbally stated theories, however solid, to have apparent weaknesses.

[PhysBang]

@117938Aa

This is simply an ad hominem circumstantial and hence a fallacy. You’re saying that I’m in the circumstance of not doing any science.

I’m sorry if the comment hurt, but, yes, you are clearly not doing any science here.

2. All species share a common ancestor - false (there are 16 different types of genomes
   ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/ta … =cgencodes
   that could not evolve one from the other without the organism destroying itself.

And you have evidence for this? Evidence that the entire scientific community lacks?

The link is the evidence. It take proteins to make DNA and DNA to make proteins. The whole thing has to be set up all at once. In order to get protein to make a whole new translation system requires a whole new set of proteins but it’s DNA that makes the protein.
[/quote]
You keep saying these things, yet they seem to be based on evidence that is not available to the scientific community.

What is your evidence that:

1. Different genomes “could not evolve one from the other without the organism destroying itself”.
2. “The whole thing has to be set up all at once.”

Certainly, the Darwinists do not have any mathematical evidence that NS acting on RM is responsible for all the variety of species. For mathematical evidence that Darwinism William Dembski lays it out for us.

Dembski is a fraud. There is little more to add to that. I am not surprised that you have been taken in by frauds, but it is somewhat sad.

@Dembski

<long, stupid Dembski quote deleted>

Dembski is using an improper probability space for his calculations. He is pretending that all proteins are equally probable to be chosen to take part in the flagellum. This is not necessarily the case. The problems of Dembski (and his dishonesty in presenting his position) are well documented. Like his use of the Wistar quotation. You can repudiate such dishonesty (and apologize for the dishonest cherry-picking you propagated here) or you can embrace intellectual dishonesty.

There are three types of motion: law, chance and design. Law cannot produce a complex genome, all four letters of the genome are the same. Law works in an input/output relationship. If the genome were built by law we would see patterns in the genome. AGTCAGTCAGTC over and over again. Now, of course a lot of the genome is repetitive, but the point is ALL of it is had to be repetitive. The rule out chance we refer to mathematics above. Design is the only plausible explanation. We test design by ruling out chance and law.

In other words: you present your dogmatic position and we do not perform any tests.

But the ID movement has a lot of funding. Strangely, they never do any experiments…

We now have 50 peer reviewed articles published.
discovery.org/a/2640
Read them if you’re interested in learning about our wonderful experiments. Douglas Axe has the biologic institute
biologicinstitute.org/
and him and Anne Gauger every day are studying biology and falsifying Darwinism in the process.
[/quote]
Your gullibility is sad. However, it does give us an opportunity to review the dishonest tactics that cdesign proponentsists use.

A nice comment on those articles is here: sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com … ed-papers/

Note that many of those supposedly pro-ID articles are identified as such merely because their author favors ID, not because they have any ID content.

So far, nothing on that list that actually purports to be the result of experiment seems threatening to evolutionary theory.

Let’s get one thing straight about Darwinism. If NS acting on RM explained anything then it would explain how one protein evolves into another. I challenge you to name me just one father protein, then name its two child proteins which are more than 20 amino acides different then inform me how NS acting on RM forced that change from the father protein into the two child proteins. There are about a billion to a trillion different proteins existing on Earth and Darwin’s wonderful theory has not explained how any protein more than 20 amino acids different from its sibling protein evolved due to NS. And several proteins are more than 1000 amino acids long, some of them even 27,000 amino acids long. This theory hasn’t explained anything and somehow it managed to become orthodoxy.

You know, you could just study science. You seem to want to take a short-cut and just assume how the world is.

[PhysBang]

@Dembski

An irreducibly complex system is a discrete combinatorial object. Probabilities therefore naturally arise and attach to such objects. Such objects are invariably composed of building blocks. Moreover, these building blocks need to be converge on some location. Finally, once at this location the building blocks need to be configured to form the object. It follows that the probability of obtaining an irreducibly complex system is the probability of originating the building blocks required for the system, multiplied times the probability of locating them in one place once the building blocks are given, multiplied times the probability of configuring them once the building blocks are given and located in one place. We therefore have three probabilities that figure into the probability of a discrete combinatorial object: porig the probability of originating the building blocks for that object; pbi the probability of locating the building blocks in one place once they are given; pconfig the probability of configuring the building blocks once they are given and in one place. Let us call the first of these the origination probability, the second the localization probability, and the third the configuration probability. It follows that the probability of a discrete combinatorial object equals the product of these three probabilities=

The problem with this approach is that it is too global a probability, taking so much into account that its results mean nothing.

Let’s look at the probability that I am a product of two parents.

pbi: The probability that two people would be together out of all the people in the world is very, very low.
pconfig: The probability that two people together would be of opposite sexes and fertile and have interactions such that they would end up mating is very low.

Even without porig, we can see the problem: it appears that it is too unlikely that I am the product of two human beings that mated.

If we were to figure out the porig, then we’d stumble into a problem that Dembski is overlooking, either through incompetence or malice. The question about parentage is how likely it is for their to be humans. The question for ID is how likely there are to be the elements of life. If humans already exist, then the probability that humans exist is 1. If living organisms already exist, then the probability that the elements of life exist is 1.

For the origin of life, the question is a little different, though there is evidence that many of the chemical structures that organisms use are the result of abiotic processes. For the question of how an organism came to get a certain (chemical) constituent, the probability that the constituent exists is in most cases very high.

the probability of getting a single representative of each of the right proteins for a flagellum together in one spot would be the probability of going through the supermarket and getting each of the right ingredients for the cake into your shopping cart. Again the probability is 1066. Actually, it is even smaller than this because the “supermarket” of proteins in E. coli contains even more items (i.e., 4,289) than the 4,000 in the cake example, thus permitting even more interfering cross-reactions and lowering the probability even more.=

If only organisms operated in such a way that they were entirely random! Yet they clearly do not, if one takes the time to look at the chemical reactions going on inside. Certain arrangements are prevented by these reactions. So it is not a case where the entire probability space of random placement is open for Dembski’s calculation.

the filament that serves as the propeller for the flagellum makes up over 90 percent of the flagellum’s mass and is comprised of more than 20,000 subunits of flagellin protein (FliC). That means going to E. coil’s “protein supermarket” and picking 20,000 items of flagellin off the shelf. The three ring proteins (Flgh, I, and F) are present in about 26 subunits each. The proximal rod requires 6 subunits, FliE 9 subunits, and FliP about 5 subunits. The distal rod consists of about 25 subunits. The hook (or U-joint) consists of about 130 subunits of FlgE.
Let us therefore assume that 5 copies of each of the 50 proteins required to construct E. cofc’s flagellum are required for a functioning flagellum (this is extremely conservative—all the numbers above were at least that and some far exceeded it, for example, the 20,000 subunits of flagellin protein in the filament). We have already assumed that each of these proteins permits 10 interchangeable proteins. That corresponds to 500 proteins in E. coWs “protein supermarket” that could legitimately go into a flagellum. By randomly selecting proteins from E. coifs “protein supermarket,” we need to get 5 copies of each of the 50 required proteins or a total of 250 proteins. Moreover, since each of the 50 required proteins has by assumption 10 interchangeable alternates, there are 500 proteins in E. coli from which these 250 can be drawn. But those 500 reside within a “protein supermarket” of 4,289 proteins. Randomly picking 250 proteins and having them all
fall among those 500 therefore has probability (500(4,289)250, which has order of magnitude 10^234 and falls considerably below the universal probability bound of 10^150 … Although the flagellum requires about 50 separate proteins for its construction, in its final form it utilizes only about 30 proteins (corresponding to the 30 character types—alphabetic and punctuation—required to express the Gettysburg Address). We can think of the remaining 20 proteins as scaffolding that falls away. Also, many more individual protein subunits constitute a flagellum than the 1,000 or so sequenced characters that make up the Gettysburg Address. Finally, a perturbation tolerance factor of 10 percent and a perturbation identity factor of 20 percent seem quite conservative for the flagellum (i.e., the perturbation tolerance factor is likely to be much smaller and the perturbation identity factor is likely to be much bigger).

Again, this imagines that there is an entirely random process that is not constrained by limits. Once one adds the limits, much of the freedom to choose off the shelf drops away. Not all, of course, since we know that random mutation can produce results. Some of these results are preserved, some are not.

[Drusuz]

All ID’s silly arguments was shot down in the Dover Highschool case, there best shot was the “irreduceable design” that things was so complex that it couldn’t be reduced, which also was teard apart.

livescience.com/3998-judge-r … class.html

People believe because they wants to believe, they are swayed by beautiful words, and alluring rethorics spewed by demagogues.

PS: On a side note, I’ve requested this thread moved to religion, as ID clearly is creationism in disguise.