Intricate cellular components are often cited as evidence of intelligent design. They couldn’t have evolved, I.D. proponents say, because they can’t be broken down into smaller, simpler functional parts. They are irreducibly complex, so they must have been intentionally designed, as is, by an intelligent entity.
But new research comparing mitochondria, which provide energy to animal cells, with their bacterial relatives, shows that the necessary pieces for one particular cellular machine — exactly the sort of structure that’s supposed to prove intelligent design — were lying around long ago. It was simply a matter of time before they came together into a more complex entity.
The pieces “were involved in some other, different function. They were recruited and acquired a new function,” said Sebastian Poggio, a postdoctoral cell biologist at Yale University and co-author of the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
hmmm.
Orgel’s second rule – ID proponents really should learn it
Nothing is “irreducibly complex.” The creationist stance is always “what use is half an eye?” The answer of course is “better than no eye at all.”
Inteligent Design? Well haven’t you ever wondered how our noses and ears are just so perfectly positioned to allow us to wear glasses? Since glasses were only invented in the last 1000 years (1284 in Italy) this leads us to the conclusion that not only were we inteligently designed but that this inteligence is able to peer into the future (or is even outside time) so as to anticipate our needs and our capabilities and design us accordingly. Some would say that if the designer was so perfect why do some of our parts wear out and why do we die? Perhaps the answer lies in the future but clearly we could all live longer if we took better care of the body and the mind. So nothing wrong with the basic design, it’s the end user that hasn’t read the manual.
Evolutionary theory is so much more elegent an explanation than god or skyhook beliefs. Creationists need to be reminded that if they have faith in gods existence why are they trying so hard to find evidence? To them surely faith is enough…unless they are somewhat doubting deep down, that tiny suppressed knot of logic pulsating every so often from within their minds?
“But new research comparing mitochondria, which provide energy to animal cells, with their bacterial relatives, shows that the necessary pieces for one particular cellular machine — exactly the sort of structure that’s supposed to prove intelligent design — **were lying around long ago. It was simply a matter of time before they came together into a more complex entity**.”
I suppose also w/parts of the space shuttle that are lying around long ago, that too is only a matter of time before they came together & become a more complex piece of machinery?
Again it’s simply expecting one to beleive that it’s possible for something so complex to happen just by happy accident. To put it simply, you dont get a Mona Lisa or Sistine Chapel just by randomly throwing paint at a canvas.
@Martin – the article shows how the theory of intelligent design doesn’t hold up. You switch to the argument of complex things “happening” which is a different subject but, all the same, the idea is that things CAN be broken down in to very simply parts that evolve over time. Inanimate objects in space to collect together and form more complex objects with their own environments (moons, rings around Saturn ect) but as space junk is all dead inanimate objects with no ability to reproduce, move and contain no functioning systems to extract energy from the environment they will of course not evolve.
@martin – “you dont get a Mona Lisa or Sistine Chapel just by randomly throwing paint at a canvas”… actually you would, eventually.
In fact, throw paint at a canvas for long enough, and you’ll paint a perfect portrait of every person that has ever lived – or will live. All you need is billions of years, and some mechanism to pick out the “good” pictures. or, even better, a mechanism to pick the good bits out of the pictures, and combine them in the next picture… welcome to evolution.
That reminds me of an old joke, I forget who by… “a million monkeys, on a million typewriters will eventually write the works of Shakespeare… wait, that’s the internet, isn’t it?
Evolution is a theory of speciation, it only explains the quantity of diversity and variety of life on this planet.
The mechanism of Evolution is Natural Selection. The mechanism of Natural Selection is DNA and its ability to replicate, incorporating change into new generations.
DNA is a language, Also needed is the interpreter for that language and the proteins that act on the instructions provided in that language to build molecules.
These are pre-requisites before any evolution through natural selection can take place.They are the mechanism through which evolution happens.
How they came into being is the interesting question, and I think the place to look is cellular automata.
@Martin
No you don’t. But then that’s not really a good analogy is it? If you had a population of random paintings breeding, mutating and mixing their genetic codes whose survival depended on how well they portrayed an enigmatic smile, perhaps you would end up with something like the Mona Lisa.
Can I just point out that if you had an infinite amount of monkeys on an infinite amount of type writers – you would NOT get the complete works of Shakespeare as that requires an emotional intelligence that would not be present or occur naturally. Just like the girl who was raised by wolves – she had no communication skills with other humans despite being human.
It’s a phrase I hear all the time – but it’s incorrect so drop it now or I’ll spank the lot of you.
@phillis – kind of makes me want to keep quoting it….
Another gap God gets evicted from..
I don\’t get you there Phillis, I always took it that the million monkeys would eventually get it right because Shakespeare\’s complete works is just a sequence of individual letters. So given an infinite amount of random keyboard bashing those pesky monkeys would eventually hit all the right keys to duplicate the sequence of those letters.
Although how they\’d know to stop when they finally did it no-one has yet to tell me..
Perhaps i need a spank?
Oww .. again this intelligent design debate? Who cares! Does it function properly!? That’s what medical science should keep focussed .. And the answer will be …NOOOOOOOO .. by far not all the time … therefor I would not call it intelligent design anyway.
Sorry, Phillis… Next in line for a spanking please. A (greatly) simplified version of the “million monkeys” would be: toss enough coins and you’ll get 10 heads in a row. It’s only about getting the right sequence, not what the sequence represents. But that’s a tangent from the story above, anyways (sorry, my fault for bringing it up).
Can I have the red paddle with the sparkles, please?
@phillis – given and infinite number of monkeys bashing on typewriters for an infinite time you would get everything ever written by anyone at any time. Ethan is right, it’s purely a matter of the right sequence of letters occurring, and given the infinite nature of the set up, that sequence is certain to occur at some point. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
*assumes the position*
As others have noted, infinite monkeys x infinite time will give you every sequence of letters that can exist… including the complete works of Shakespeare, a million copies of the same with a single misspelled word, billions more with two misspellings, every other book ever written or unwritten, flawed versions of those, and truly astronomical amounts of gibberish. The monkeys wouldn’t be able to tell them apart, of course.
Actually seeing as according to the theory of evolution we all decended from apes or ape like beings, I’d say that Shakespeare IS the infinite ‘monkey’ who produced the complete works of Shakespeare (unless you believe physicist and philosopher Francis Bacon who claimed he ghost-wrote the lot). QED. Who says monkeys can’t be emotionally intelligent?
And please feel free to spank this monkey as hard as you like
And while I’m in a nit-picking mood I agree with Martin… you don’t get a Sistine chapel by randomly throwing buckets of paint at a canvas.
1. First you have to build a chapel. I suggest you chuck an infinite quantity of bricks, cement and rooftiles about before you start laying on the undercoat.
2. The painting I think you’re refering to is part fresco and part mural, so rather than waste your cash on a canvas you should be lobbing it at the ceiling and walls
Sorry, I think I should stop now… I’m talking Pollocks again!
I’m all overcome with emulsion!
Another way of looking at this monkey business would be to think about how random any sequence of letters (or numbers) is. How could you tell, just by looking at them, if a sequence was generated randomly?
If we had a completely random text generator select 11 letters (at random!) it might give us “iwhacrtgsel” or “abcdefghijk” or even “derrenbrown”. As randomly generated sequences of 11 letters go, they are just as likely as any other sequence, but from those three you’d probably only consider the first one to be a random sequence of letters (it wasn’t).
The distinction between “random” and “randomly generated” can be an important one.
However you look at it, if you place an infinite amount of monkeys on an infinite amount of typewriters, you’re going to get a lot of poo.