Pierson5 wrote: ID is already a scientific study in several areas?
So you don't know the definition of ID;
What is intelligent design?
Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system's components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence.
http://www.intelligentdesign.org/whatisid.php
Pierson5 wrote: I assume you are referring to humans being the intelligent designers, which is not the same thing as invoking the supernatural.
Assumption would be a bad thing in this case. Human beings are one type of being that posesses an aspect called intelligence;
Intelligence
1a : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations
b : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria
http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/intelligence
There are a variety of beings who posess varying degrees of intelligence. No one in the ID camp is asserting anything supernatural since such an assertion is beyoond the scope defined for ID.
Pierson5 wrote:If you are referring to the same designer responsible for life, which area of science is this designer invoked?
If you understood ID then you would know that a specified designer is not part of the scope that ID encompasses.
Pierson5 wrote:When you refer to falsifiability, you say ID can be falsified, except when it can't, and falls into a gray area.
ID can be eliminated as a "necessary" cause even though it still remains a possible cause because of the simplicity of a design. A pile of sand can be arranged by an intelligent designer to look like something that natural forces could form. Intelligence can cause a vast array of formations given the time and energy to allow it to perform.
So, if you read my point carefully it doesn't state that it can be falsified as a cause and if you understood how intelligence worked you would understand that there is almost nothing that inteligence cannot mimic in nature. There is simply a level of intelligent design that falls within the same observable characteristics as natural formation where one cannot empirically assert its necessity to explain the observation.
KBCid wrote:
So if an experimenter theorizes that all life evolved from a common ancestor then he must also define an experiment to test his theory. Tell me what test can be performed to test this theory?. Historical happenings that are beyond an experimenters ability to verify is where the line is crossed for scientific methodology and plunges head first into religion.
You can religiously believe that life had a common ancestor but, you have zero observable historic evidence that there was one and you have no possible method to test it. Therefore, you have nothing to base the theory on. Unscientific in every sense but, a darned good religious philosophy to get others to believe in if your pushing a religious agenda.
Pierson5 wrote:You claim evolution is non-falsifiable because it's considered a "historical occurrence" and not reproducible. That's false.
Really? then you can show me all the variations that life went through to become what we observe today and you can show all the forces that played a part in making it happen?
Pierson5 wrote:Evolution is absolutely falsifiable. Here are a few things that would falsify evolution: If we found a rabbit fossil in the Precambrian period, a static (non-changing) fossil record over time,
Playing the micro card in a macro conversation I see. Typical and expected. Most everyone now is beyond that slight of hand though.
Pierson5 wrote: if genetic/molecular evidence came back showing human's closest ancestor was the parakeet,
How much of a genome is compared between assumed 'ancestors'? What exactly is compared?
Pierson5 wrote:confirmation that mutations are prevented from accumulating and, of course, any observations showing organisms being created supernaturally. "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." - Charles Darwin
Tell me what complex organ can you show that did come about by "numerous, successive, slight modifications". Science is not really about proving what is impossible it is more about providing empirical evidence for what is possible. It is not sciences job to prove that pink elephants and fairies don't exist. As noted it is the investigators job to provide a solution via scientific method to confirm or deny an assertion of a hypothesis.
Pierson5 wrote:Intelligent Design explanations involving the direct intervention of the supernatural in the physical world are not falsifiable, because any result of an experiment or investigation could be the unpredictable action of an omnipotent deity. I do agree with your last statement. Could you propose an experiment on how we could test (or falsify) ID?
Why do you feel that supernatural intervention is part of the explanitory scope posited by ID? Do you simply feel the need to set up strawmen? ID posits as much supernatural causes as evolution.
Pierson5 wrote:Aside from presupposing the existence of an all-knowing being that designed everything,
You are consistent with the strawman arguement. Does this method of debate somehow make you feel better about what your doing or are you simply regurgitating things you read somewhere else? You do realize that missrepresenting others is not a proper method of debate? This is a method of spreading propaganda.
Pierson5 wrote:ID doesn't explain a number of bizarre and harmful morphological and molecular features. (e.g. the fact that upright mammals support 70% of their weight on a single column.
it doesn't? and only 70% hmmmm.
STANDING, LINE OF GRAVITY AT JOINTS, POSTURAL SWAY and CORRECTION OF PERTURBATIONS
Changes in stance (Smith 1953,1956)
...most of the time, people tend to stand asymmetrically, with most of their weight on one leg (about 80 - 90% of body weight) while the other leg acts as a prop to control forward sway of the body
http://www.med.unsw.edu.au/somsweb.nsf/ ... stance.pdf
So in your engineering experience intelligent designers would not logically form any structures that support 70% of their weight on a single point. Interesting. Have you ever seen one of these intelligent designs;
http://www.torkerusa.com/bikes/unicycles
Pierson5 wrote:The fact that human mouths don't have enough room for the teeth that come in.
Are we talking the original human mouth or one that has been in a state of variance for thousands of years?
Pierson5 wrote:The fact that our vision has severe problems compared to a number of other animals (much less what it could be).
Your vision has severe problems? mine seems to work just fine for what it is used for. So you 'assume' that the structure of the human body could be better based on what exactly? How would you engineer the human eye and how would it impact the performance. I would further ask how your proposed change would affect other bodily systems.
Pierson5 wrote:Men having nipples
Ah the age old evo question that infers no intelligence could possibly be involved. I have always liked this one. How much do you understand about reproduction? maybe a bit of biology education is in order here;
Zygote
A zygote is always synthesized from the union of two gametes, and constitutes the first stage in a unique organism's development. Zygotes are usually produced by a fertilization event between two haploid cells—an ovum (female gamete) and a sperm cell (male gamete)—which combine to form the single diploid cell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygote
In order for the two gametes to properly meld together they must both have genetic information pertaining to the structures they each individually code for. If one of the parents supplying the gametes didn't have coding for a structure then it would not be able to match up with another gamete that did have the structure and it would have to work the same way as the x and y chromosome do.
Men have nipples simply to match the chromosomal structure that women have as part of their design necessary to care for an offspring. This, again is where your understanding of 3 dimensional structuring and replication is obviously nonexistent.
Pierson5 wrote:the existence of the human tailbone, etc, etc).
Ahh the mechanical engineer questions mechanical engineering again;
Coccyx
The coccyx commonly referred to as the tailbone, is the final segment of the vertebral column in tailless primates...
...it is an important attachment for various muscles, tendons and ligaments—which makes it necessary for physicians and patients to pay special attention to these attachments when considering surgical removal of the coccyx.[2] Additionally, it is also a part of the weight-bearing tripod structure which acts as a support for a sitting person. When a person sits leaning forward, the ischial tuberosities and inferior rami of the ischium take most of the weight, but as the sitting person leans backward, more weight is transferred to the coccyx..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccyx
If you really believe that your tailbone serves no purpose then I defy you to go to a doctor and ask to have it removed.
Pierson5 wrote:But it can always be said "Ah, but maybe that's what the designer wanted. We can't know his intentions." An eternal way to protect a flawed theory and is, again, unfalsifiable.
Wel for some people your answer is all they can muster because they are not mechanical engineers. however, in my case you didn't get that answer. You assume that since most people can't provide a rationale for something then that something has no purpose.
Did you ever reverse engineer something? This is a tough point of view to convey to someone who has never tried. I do this on a regular basis as well as forming 3 dimensional stutures de novo.
Here is a story for a budding reverse engineer.
I had a student who I was to train in some specific understandings about mechanical engineering and at the time we had an old car that was serving as a conceptual training device. As we were looking under the hood the student noticed 4 ring bolts that for all appearances performed absolutely no function in the normal operation of the machine itself so he asked what they were for.
I considered just telling him what they were but figured this would be a good time to see how his reverse engineering skills were coming along so I asked him to study them for awhile and see if he could solve this riddle on his own. Well he took this pretty serious as a challenge to his intelligence and he spent a few hours inspecting and analyzing and eventually he gave up and wanted the answer.
I told him that he must not just give up just because something isn't apparent from casual logic and I told him that maybe we should remove the engine from the car and possibly do some disassembly to see the inner workings and whether it may give further understanding to this mystery. So he commenced to disconnecting everything that held the motor in the car and then positioned the engine hoist in preparation for hoisting the engine out of the engine bay. As he stood there considering where to hook the chains to the motor he said "you know the rings will make nice points to connnect the chains to, do you suppose anything would be harmed if I hook onto them?" I assured him that would be fine and he hooked them up and began to lift the engine out. As the weight of the engine / transmission became suspended he notice how nicely the connection points allowed the weight to be supported evenly at an angle so that engine and tranny would slide cleanly out of the engine bay.
It was near the end of this excercise that it dawned on him that the ring bolts had nothing to do with the function of the motor.... they were the factory hoist points used for the assembly of the car itself. These point had been calculated by an intelligent designer to allow the factory to quickly assemble components.
Pierson5 wrote:As for "finding the common ancestor," I encourage you to study geology and evolutionary biology to understand why putting our finger on exactly where a common ancestor existed and what it looked like is nearly impossible. A lot things in science are known through inference (conclusion based on data).
I am quite well versed in the data.... errrr absence of data concerning the common ancestor of life.
Pierson5 wrote:I'm sure you could say "We can infer an intelligent designer." Then I would respond "Show me the converging lines of evidence that support that hypothesis."
Mechanisms that perform the same conceptual 'FUNCTIONS' that only intelligence has ever been seen to form. 3 dimensional structuring based on a reference point and defined points in space relative to the reference point which only intelligence has ever been seen to form structures with. Data storage and reader which must come coexist prior to 'function'ality. The list is quite long for all the converging lines of evidence but, it requires a bit of mechanical understanding to comprehend mechanically engineered structures.
Pierson5 wrote:Regardless, evolution is the change in species over time, it's a process.
Evolutions engine of change presumed / assumed to be random mutation and natural selection over time is the process by which alleles change. All you need to do is prove that the changes are really random.
Pierson5 wrote:I mean, even if God made the first life form, that would not invalidate evolution a tiny bit. You criticize that evolutionary theory takes this part for 'granted' (which I am not saying it does in any way), but if this part of the theory, the first parent organism, were to be proven to be invalidated, evolution would still be a viable theory, given our knowledge of genetics and other lines of evidence.
If God made life and designed in the variability then the change in alleles is not simply random mutation. Evolutions engine of change would indeed be invalidated as the mechanism of controlled variability is elucidated.
Evolutionary theory is the explanation used to explain the unknown to others without understanding who will believe anything that sounds logical to them. With a childs understanding of mechanics a cardbord box can logically fly to the moon. Evolution is the fairytale that adults use to assert that molecules can change bit by bit into any living thing they see.
]
), etc... Excellent story/teaching methods by the way. The problem is, we know that man-made objects are designed a posteriori. We know companies that make cars/motors/workshops. They are made out of many materials such as polished, purified metal or plastic which does not occur in nature. We know these things are designed because we have evidence and knowledge of these situations and can logically conclude they are designed. 
