Critique of Intelligent Design

Why ? Because I refuse to play your little games ? Evolution theory is here to stay and accepted by some major Christian religions, even Catholics. It’s not made up shit. It saves lives. It’s not up to me to support anything in detail. It’s supported by every medical and related facility in the world….
What religions and why would that interest me? Are you suddenly going religious on us here?
 
You’re totally confused. Not me. We study genetics, a foundation in evolution, for engineered cures.
When a species is decimated by another species so only those with the genetic predisposition for survival survive, it’s same as selective breeding. We use selective breeding for mice testing for vaccines and a host of other treatments. We can also selectively develope Radiation for cancer cures, which according to quantum biology, may be involved in evolution. It’s not as random as you think. It’s all interrelated and I’m not confused. Go to any accredited web site and look it up. We mimic natural human function even to the extent we use it in computer technology.
Wow, a genuine hero. Still you can't explain your fascination with Dennis Eckersley's photo. Does he know what you do?
 
Throwing temper tantrums and repeating nonsense, as Darwin's followers do constantly, is anti-scientific and unintelligent.

_____________________________________________

  • johnjaeger
Thu 9/14/2023 11:35 AM

Hi John—

Your critique of the Dawkins weasel demonstration found its way to me, and I agree with it entirely. I offered my own critique in Undeniable (p198-200). You hit the nail on the head!

Regrettably, even solid refutations of evolutionary arguments like this don’t seem to get their proponents to rethink their position. I’ve become convinced that this is because the root problem is spiritual, not scientific or intellectual.

Best regards,

Doug Axe

Douglas Axe, PhD
Rosa Endowed Chair of Molecular Biology
Professor of Computational Biology
Co-Director of Stewart Science Honors Program
School of Science, Technology & Health
Biola University


______________________________________

Weasel program - Wikipedia

In chapter 3 of his book The Blind Watchmaker, biologist Richard Dawkins gave the following introduction to the program, referencing the well-known infinite monkey theorem.*

I don't know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare. The operative phrase is, of course, given enough time. Let us limit the task facing our monkey somewhat. Suppose that he has to produce, not the complete works of Shakespeare but just the short sentence 'Methinks it is like a weasel', and we shall make it relatively easy by giving him a typewriter with a restricted keyboard, one with just the 26 (capital) letters, and a space bar. How long will he take to write this one little sentence?

[NOTE: How lazy of Richard Dawkins to fail to look up the author of his monkey business. It was Sir Arthur Eddington.

In 1928, British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington presented a classical illustration of chance in his book, The Nature of the Physical World: “If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.”

This is nonsense compounding nonsense. And yet my high school math teacher presented this proposition to his classes in the 1960’s.

First, an “army of monkeys” wouldn’t be very interested in hitting typewriter keys repeatedly. There is nothing for them to gain in so doing.

Second, those who did hit the keys would quickly get to the end of the line, and have no concept of returning the carriage to type the second line.

Third, those very few who somehow overcame the first and second hurdles, repeatedly, would find that the paper was ejected from the carriage, and they are hopelessly unable to replace the first page with a fresh sheet of paper.

Fourth, we will never get to the fourth problem of exhausting the ink in the typewriter ribbons because the “army of monkeys” would have defecated on or otherwise ruined every typewriter.

Fifth, Sir Arthur Eddington never began to consider the statistics of monkeys “selecting” 1 out of approximately 100 different keys, counting upper and lower case of all letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. A page of an average book has 250 – 300 words. (
https://hotghostwriter.com/blogs/blog/novel-length-how-long-is-long-enough)

*Finally, the largest army in the world is the People’s Liberation Army of Communist China, with over 2,000,000 troops. This is hardly “infinite” in number. (
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/)

The average word has 6.47 letters. (
https://capitalizemytitle.com/character-count/100-characters/)

Using the lower value of 250 words, times 6.47 letters equals 1,617 characters in a page.

1/100 to the 1,617th power is 10-3,234, for just one page, much less “all the books in the British Museum.”

“we just think of one chance in 10 to the 40th power” as “impossible”. – Richard Dawkins, (The Blind Watchmaker, page 142)

Emil Borel, a famous statistician, defined “impossible” as an event with a probability of 10 to the -50 or less.


https://owlcation.com/stem/Borels-Law-of-Probability

This is equivalent to finding one unique marble, in 82,800 spheres the size of our solar system out to Pluto, all full of identical marbles except for one, on your first and only attempt. You do not get an infinite number of attempts, not even two.

Therefore 1050 marbles, each 1cm in diameter, would occupy 82,800 spheres reaching from the center of the sun to Pluto, 5.906 billion kilometers from the sun. (10 to the 5 marbles/km)3 = 10 to the 15 marbles per cubic km x 4/3 pi (5.9706 km to center of sun) cubed is only 1/82,800th of 10 to the 50.]



Dawkins then goes on to show that a process of cumulative selection can take far fewer steps to reach any given target. In Dawkins' words:

We again use our computer monkey, but with a crucial difference in its program. It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, just as before ... it duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error – 'mutation' – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the 'progeny' of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.

Generation 01: WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P [2]

Generation 02: WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P

Generation 10: MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P

Generation 20: MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL

Generation 30: METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL

Generation 40: METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL

Generation 43: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL

Dawkins continues:

The exact time taken by the computer to reach the target doesn't matter. If you want to know, it completed the whole exercise for me, the first time, while I was out to lunch. It took about half an hour. (Computer enthusiasts may think this unduly slow. The reason is that the program was written in BASIC, a sort of computer baby-talk. When I rewrote it in Pascal, it took 11 seconds.) Computers are a bit faster at this kind of thing than monkeys, but the difference really isn't significant. What matters is the difference between the time taken by cumulative selection, and the time which the same computer, working flat out at the same rate, would take to reach the target phrase if it were forced to use the other procedure of single-step selection: about a million million million million million years. This is more than a million million million times as long as the universe has so far existed.



[So much for Dawkins’ specious argument in defense of Darwinism, which he proudly claimed, “… made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (http://UncommonDescent.com) Twenty-six capital letters plus the space bar equals twenty-seven. Twenty-seven to the twenty-eighth power equals ten to the fortieth different possible combinations, of which we seek only one specifically. Dawkins admits his definition of “impossible” is 1 chance in 10 to the 40th power. This is not for all of Shakespeare’s works, but for one short sentence, and even then on a dramatically altered keyboard, not of fifty possible keys, lower case, and fifty more keys, upper case, but for only twenty-six keys, all upper case.

Of critical but neglected importance is the fact that for “selection” to occur, the intermediary produced by the random mutation MUST confer a “selective advantage” for the host organism, otherwise it will be lost. It is therefore incumbent on the advocate for Darwinism to demonstrate, in each case, what that improvement is and how it operates, every single time, without exception. “Selection” requires no less. This is easily done when copying short sentences, but not so easily done when originally constructing over 20,000 proteins in humansa, the largest of which is titin, at 38,138b amino acid residues in length. 1 out of 20 amino acids “selected” consecutively 38,138 times has a probability of 1 chance in 10 to the 49,618. This is for only one protein. Calculating for chirality, i.e. the “selection” of L amino acids instead of D amino acidsc and all peptide bonds rather than the equally probable non-peptide bondsd reduces the probability of original naturalistic synthesis to 1 chance in 10 to the 72,578. Twenty thousand more proteins to go! ]

a -
https://www.omim.org/entry/188840\

b - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4889822/

c - ½ to the 38,138 = 10-11,480

d - ½ to the 38,138 = 10-11,480

The insuperable statistics of naturalistic polypeptide synthesis forever doom the folly of Darwinian evolution.
 
Last edited:
Did you ever visit a dictionary in your life.
What a stupid sentence. I am not responisble for your impatience. Do not speak with a stutterer if you never learned to listen and you have also not the intention to learn to listen.
 
Throwing temper tantrums and repeating nonsense, as Darwin's followers do constantly, is anti-scientific and unintelligent.

_____________________________________________

  • johnjaeger
Thu 9/14/2023 11:35 AM

Hi John—

Your critique of the Dawkins weasel demonstration found its way to me, and I agree with it entirely. I offered my own critique in Undeniable (p198-200). You hit the nail on the head!

Regrettably, even solid refutations of evolutionary arguments like this don’t seem to get their proponents to rethink their position. I’ve become convinced that this is because the root problem is spiritual, not scientific or intellectual.

Best regards,

Doug Axe

Douglas Axe, PhD
Rosa Endowed Chair of Molecular Biology
Professor of Computational Biology
Co-Director of Stewart Science Honors Program
School of Science, Technology & Health
Biola University


______________________________________

Weasel program - Wikipedia

In chapter 3 of his book The Blind Watchmaker, biologist Richard Dawkins gave the following introduction to the program, referencing the well-known infinite monkey theorem.*

I don't know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare. The operative phrase is, of course, given enough time. Let us limit the task facing our monkey somewhat. Suppose that he has to produce, not the complete works of Shakespeare but just the short sentence 'Methinks it is like a weasel', and we shall make it relatively easy by giving him a typewriter with a restricted keyboard, one with just the 26 (capital) letters, and a space bar. How long will he take to write this one little sentence?

[NOTE: How lazy of Richard Dawkins to fail to look up the author of his monkey business. It was Sir Arthur Eddington.

In 1928, British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington presented a classical illustration of chance in his book, The Nature of the Physical World: “If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.”

This is nonsense compounding nonsense. And yet my high school math teacher presented this proposition to his classes in the 1960’s.

First, an “army of monkeys” wouldn’t be very interested in hitting typewriter keys repeatedly. There is nothing for them to gain in so doing.

Second, those who did hit the keys would quickly get to the end of the line, and have no concept of returning the carriage to type the second line.

Third, those very few who somehow overcame the first and second hurdles, repeatedly, would find that the paper was ejected from the carriage, and they are hopelessly unable to replace the first page with a fresh sheet of paper.

Fourth, we will never get to the fourth problem of exhausting the ink in the typewriter ribbons because the “army of monkeys” would have defecated on or otherwise ruined every typewriter.

Fifth, Sir Arthur Eddington never began to consider the statistics of monkeys “selecting” 1 out of approximately 100 different keys, counting upper and lower case of all letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. A page of an average book has 250 – 300 words. (
https://hotghostwriter.com/blogs/blog/novel-length-how-long-is-long-enough)

*Finally, the largest army in the world is the People’s Liberation Army of Communist China, with over 2,000,000 troops. This is hardly “infinite” in number. (
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/)

The average word has 6.47 letters. (
https://capitalizemytitle.com/character-count/100-characters/)

Using the lower value of 250 words, times 6.47 letters equals 1,617 characters in a page.

1/100 to the 1,617th power is 10-3,234, for just one page, much less “all the books in the British Museum.”

“we just think of one chance in 10 to the 40th power” as “impossible”. – Richard Dawkins, (The Blind Watchmaker, page 142)

Emil Borel, a famous statistician, defined “impossible” as an event with a probability of 10 to the -50 or less.


https://owlcation.com/stem/Borels-Law-of-Probability

This is equivalent to finding one unique marble, in 82,800 spheres the size of our solar system out to Pluto, all full of identical marbles except for one, on your first and only attempt. You do not get an infinite number of attempts, not even two.

Therefore 1050 marbles, each 1cm in diameter, would occupy 82,800 spheres reaching from the center of the sun to Pluto, 5.906 billion kilometers from the sun. (10 to the 5 marbles/km)3 = 10 to the 15 marbles per cubic km x 4/3 pi (5.9706 km to center of sun) cubed is only 1/82,800th of 10 to the 50.]



Dawkins then goes on to show that a process of cumulative selection can take far fewer steps to reach any given target. In Dawkins' words:

We again use our computer monkey, but with a crucial difference in its program. It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, just as before ... it duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error – 'mutation' – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the 'progeny' of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.

Generation 01: WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P [2]

Generation 02: WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P

Generation 10: MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P

Generation 20: MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL

Generation 30: METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL

Generation 40: METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL

Generation 43: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL

Dawkins continues:

The exact time taken by the computer to reach the target doesn't matter. If you want to know, it completed the whole exercise for me, the first time, while I was out to lunch. It took about half an hour. (Computer enthusiasts may think this unduly slow. The reason is that the program was written in BASIC, a sort of computer baby-talk. When I rewrote it in Pascal, it took 11 seconds.) Computers are a bit faster at this kind of thing than monkeys, but the difference really isn't significant. What matters is the difference between the time taken by cumulative selection, and the time which the same computer, working flat out at the same rate, would take to reach the target phrase if it were forced to use the other procedure of single-step selection: about a million million million million million years. This is more than a million million million times as long as the universe has so far existed.



[So much for Dawkins’ specious argument in defense of Darwinism, which he proudly claimed, “… made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (http://UncommonDescent.com) Twenty-six capital letters plus the space bar equals twenty-seven. Twenty-seven to the twenty-eighth power equals ten to the fortieth different possible combinations, of which we seek only one specifically. Dawkins admits his definition of “impossible” is 1 chance in 10 to the 40th power. This is not for all of Shakespeare’s works, but for one short sentence, and even then on a dramatically altered keyboard, not of fifty possible keys, lower case, and fifty more keys, upper case, but for only twenty-six keys, all upper case.

Of critical but neglected importance is the fact that for “selection” to occur, the intermediary produced by the random mutation MUST confer a “selective advantage” for the host organism, otherwise it will be lost. It is therefore incumbent on the advocate for Darwinism to demonstrate, in each case, what that improvement is and how it operates, every single time, without exception. “Selection” requires no less. This is easily done when copying short sentences, but not so easily done when originally constructing over 20,000 proteins in humansa, the largest of which is titin, at 38,138b amino acid residues in length. 1 out of 20 amino acids “selected” consecutively 38,138 times has a probability of 1 chance in 10 to the 49,618. This is for only one protein. Calculating for chirality, i.e. the “selection” of L amino acids instead of D amino acidsc and all peptide bonds rather than the equally probable non-peptide bondsd reduces the probability of original naturalistic synthesis to 1 chance in 10 to the 72,578. Twenty thousand more proteins to go! ]

a -
https://www.omim.org/entry/188840\

b - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4889822/

c - ½ to the 38,138 = 10-11,480

d - ½ to the 38,138 = 10-11,480

The insuperable statistics of naturalistic polypeptide synthesis forever doom the folly of Darwinian evolution.


Wait. Do you mean Doug Axe from the ID’iot creationer Disco’tute?

Now that’s pretty darn funny.




Axe is a zealous creationist associated with the Discovery Institute (he is the director at their “Biologic Institute"). Axe is a molecular biologist, and thus actually knows some science. He uses this knowledge to write mundane papers, at least two of which have been published in low-tier, although genuine, journals - despite being uninteresting and mundane. Axe’s work is hailed by the Discovery Institute as evidence for their views. Of course, there is no actual support of intelligent design in these published papers, and Axe himself admits as much: Axe (2004) and the evolution of enzyme function

Insofar as Axe is a creationist with real scientific publications to his name, Axe’s work is one of the main contributions to a sheen of legitimacy for the ID movement. But given that his publications do not at all support or even touch on their views (but are willfully interpreted as such by other ID-proponents without Axe complaining) he is an important contributor to erecting the framework of dishonesty that is the ID movement.

Diagnosis: Dishonest wingnut who might pose a genuine if minor threat to science and rationality as a creationist with actually published (though unrelated) material.
 
How is it at all possible that genes "evolved" from inorganic molecules given the impossible odds against it?

If there were only 52 (deck of playing cards) molecules or genes, or proteins to form a cell, you would have to have 10^50 attempts EVERY SECOND since the start of the Universe to form correctly. Instead there are thousands of components, not just 52. Evolution is IMPOSSIBLE
Do you know the difference between organic and inorganic molecules ? It’s not the hard.
 
Do you know the difference between organic and inorganic molecules ? It’s not the hard.
I’m talking to an absurd 6th grader.

Are you AI generated, do you just repeat back key phrases?
 
This thread will develop a critique of intelligent design, otherwise known as religious creationism. We choose the Broocks-Hedin assemblage because they will be speaking on 25 Oct 2023 in the very town that called them on their supposed "evidence."
4 Mar 2021 A Creationist Writes In
Part of the problem here is equating 'creationism' with 'intelligent design.' While creationism does incorporate intelligent design into the theology, intelligent design in itself does not need to include creationism.

Einstein for instance did not believe in a personal God with whom people had a relationship. But he believed in Spinoza's God or God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists. Einstein theorized that there is so much rational consistency in the universe that to think it all happened purely by chance/natural selection was simply not logical. He theorized there was some universal intelligence guiding the process.
 
Part of the problem here is equating 'creationism' with 'intelligent design.' While creationism does incorporate intelligent design into the theology, intelligent design in itself does not need to include creationism.

Einstein for instance did not believe in a personal God with whom people had a relationship. But he believed in Spinoza's God or God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists. Einstein theorized that there is so much rational consistency in the universe that to think it all happened purely by chance/natural selection was simply not logical. He theorized there was some universal intelligence guiding the process.
Still no evidence.
 
You’re the one babbling about inorganic molecules …..and you obviously don’t have a clue. No reference, nothing.

Clueless person with nothing to back it up! Just rambling about things he can't understand
 
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