It's going to get interesting when someone employs Intelligent Design,
and actually does something with what they have learned about Human Evolution ...
I'm not arguing for ID, but the ID side already have presented several good arguments. What they haven't been able to complete is be accepted as science.
Biology - Evolution cannot explain beauty and complexity (for complexity, we got that with the human and animals eye and ear)
Physics - Fine tuning (I know it from reading Stephen Hawking and his scientists articles from 2007-2011, but they took it all down b/c it went against evo)
Cosmology - Kalam Cosmological Argument I & II
You have never offered a good argument for ID'iot creationism because there isn't any.
Evolution certainly can explain the all-knowing, all-seeing eye. A standard ID'iot creationer claim is that eye is too complex to have developed naturally, thus, ''The Gawds Did It''.
Claim CB301:
The eye is too complex to have evolved.
Source:
Brown, Walt, 1995.
In the Beginning: Compelling evidence for creation and the Flood. Phoenix, AZ: Center for Scientific Creation, p. 7.
Hitching, Francis, 1982.
The Neck of the Giraffe, New York: Meridian, pp. 66-68.
Response:
- This is the quintessential example of the argument from incredulity. The source making the claim usually quotes Darwinsaying that the evolution of the eye seems "absurd in the highest degree". However, Darwin follows that statement with a three-and-a-half-page proposal of intermediate stages through which eyes might have evolved via gradual steps (Darwin 1872).
- photosensitive cell
- aggregates of pigment cells without a nerve
- an optic nerve surrounded by pigment cells and covered by translucent skin
- pigment cells forming a small depression
- pigment cells forming a deeper depression
- the skin over the depression taking a lens shape
- muscles allowing the lens to adjust
- All of these steps are known to be viable because all exist in animals living today. The increments between these steps are slight and may be broken down into even smaller increments. Natural selection should, under many circumstances, favor the increments. Since eyes do not fossilize well, we do not know that the development of the eye followed exactly that path, but we certainly cannot claim that no path exists.
Evidence for one step in the evolution of the vertebrate eye comes from comparative anatomy and genetics. The vertebrate βγ-crystallin genes, which code for several proteins crucial for the lens, are very similar to the Ciona βγ-crystallin gene. Ciona is an urochordate, a distant relative of vertebrates. Ciona's single βγ-crystallin gene is expressed in its otolith, a pigmented sister cell of the light-sensing ocellus. The origin of the lens appears to be based on co-optation of previously existing elements in a lensless system.
Nilsson and Pelger (1994) calculated that if each step were a 1 percent change, the evolution of the eye would take 1,829 steps, which could happen in 364,000 generations.
There is no obvious ''fine tuning'' of the natural world. It is dishonest to claim that Hawking and ''his scientists'' made any affirmative case for supernatural ''fine tuning''.
The Kalam argument is a philosophical one and exploits the fact that philosophical arguments can be made for anything because ultimately they are not burdened by the requirement for factual support and ultimately have no requirement to be true.
Again, you are wrong. It's your side that supposedly has the advantage on this, but the current news is current news.
