DNA animation

Precisely.

Or merely magazine pages (or websites nowadays) to fill with copy.

Yebbut dark energy and dark matter are currently as appealing

required.

But the young earthers would never say the latter!

Craig Ventner is worth watching.

Yup, "emergent behaviour" is difficult for many people to believe - even with the examples of modern operating systems and machine learning!

Yup. I worked that out all by myself at, maybe, 10yo.

Nonsense. An example...

My very primitive third eye[1] is very useful; it has saved me from injury many times.

Bury that in a depression and it would have a sense of direction, and be as effective as the "extra" primitive eyes in pit vipers.

I read one book that suggests that our retinas aren't designed wrong. The light has to make its way through a maze of nerves and blood vessels to hit the sensitive stuff on the back of the retina, which sounds bad, but the light is conveyed through the maze on fiber optics.

I wonder how that could evolve by random processes.

Great minds think alike...

ent

eve

tle

The thing we have not found out yet is whether there are forces directing e volution or not. We talk about it as if live was created randomly, but jus t as mountains are the inevitable results of movements of the earth's crust or planets are the inevitable results of coalescing clouds of gas, life ma y be an inevitable result of various self organizing forces we simply have not discovered.

While I doubt there is life elsewhere that would be at all like humanoids o n Star Trek type TV shows, other beings may well have bilateral symmetry, h ave hands, walk erect, etc. I wonder if they would have very different eye s or see at other wavelengths or even have other senses we don't. While it is entirely possible they would be based on other chemistry, I suspect car bon would be a frequent theme.

Language would be the more interesting aspect of extra terrestrial, intelli gent life. Look at the variations we have here on Earth. Then imagine the immense variety possible.

Would discovery of other intelligent life support of disprove creationism?

Each step is not as unlikely. Spark some gasses and you make amino acids. The atoms don't go back and separate. When they form protiens and enzymes they are stable and don't go backward.

Hold a ratchet wrench by the nut and bang you hand on your knee. It occasionally clicks one step, and will eventually go all the way around. The chance of it going around all at once is still small, but to go in steps is 100%.

You mean because the visual cortex is in the back? Nerves from the retina pass through the brain horizontally and muscle control goes vertically. The signals meet at lots of points that probably make hand-eye coordination possible. How else could we react to movement before cognizing it?

There are lots of other flaws though. I'm told that a fish's heart is between its brain and throat, so the nerves to the throat pass by the heart, and that they also pass by our hearts and a giraffe's heart before going back up to the throat. Plenty of flaws are more obvious like the backbone having the same design in bipeds and quadropeds, and the giraffe having the same number of vertebra.

I'm always incredulous at the lack of thinking ability when people say complexity requires a designer, but it doesn't occur to them that a designer must also be complex.

There is still a lot of hand waving. As in

"it is fruitful to consider the alternative possibility that RNA was preceded by some other replicating, evolving molecule, just as DNA and proteins were preceded by RNA."

Is that a fact? In modern life, DNA builds RNA.

Some lab should come up with a working non-DNA self-replicating system that could evolve. But then that would be intelligent design.

Certainly macro things like organs can evolve [2] but that's not the issue. The big question is how the incredibly complex DNA mechanisms could have evolved form inorganics, and how DNA got programmed to manufacture, for example, DNA.

Most of our DNA is said to be garbage that does nothing. Whether that is true or not, it makes sense that random changes would replicate whether they are good or neutral. As long as they are not fatal.

"Tom Del Rosso" wrote in message news:qav3jo$v1g$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me...

Indeed, and not just complex, but _more_ complex.

And what if -- it's designers all the way down? Well, it *certainly* can't be that. Any sufficiently advanced being would contain so much information it would collapse into a black hole! To assume that such a "god" exists, contradicts the laws of physics-as-we-know-them.

Tim

As in "who designed the designer"? Well, those who assume a designer feel the designer is something special and "other worldly", therefore beyond our questioning.

Our special beings are constructed so that any questions about them are either answered obviously or are not allowed.

Any such infinitely complex being that was capable of creating life likely knows a thing or two about the universe and is not bound by the limitations imagined by the likes of us.

't

on

"? Lord, if you won't take care of us Won't you please, please let us be?"

-- Randy Newman

I'm astounded that, facing a process of immense complexity, how many people insist that they have a simple explanation, and mock all other possibilities.

Emotion and prejudice always deflect the progress of science.

There are lots of reasonable paths to building our biology other than random mutation and selection, but too many people refuse to even think about them, but prefer to use their limited imaginations to manufacture insults.

You exist: too late.

No, I don't mean that.

See the picture and captions at the top right of

Yup.

"ID" can't possibly mean intelligent design; incompetent design would be more appropriate (if equally inaccurate).