It is my belief that there are people in the world like me — people who are tired of the heated debates, name-calling, innuendo, and political fights. Such people might find themselves in the middle ground and would rather focus on the hypotheses, the arguments, and the evidence. We might not be completely convinced that life was designed, yet we find the hypothesis to be tremendously intriguing. Rather than belaboring the concern as to whether the study of Intelligent Design should be labeled science, metaphysics, or religion, it is my belief that there are people who would rather just ponder the issues that are raised by design and evolution.

(Introduction, p.xi)

And another one:

The success of Darwin's theory has nothing to do with proving design is impossible. The success stems from the manner in which Darwin's theory has been successfully used to guide research and generate insights into biology. Such research and insights have, in turn, generated much circumstantial evidence that supports the Darwinian thesis.
What if Darwin had formulated his argument differently? Imagine that instead of looking for facts that support the possibility of gradual transitions, Darwin had attempted to argue that design was impossible. Imagine further that he took this approach as a defensive posture in response to someone's challenge that if it could be proven impossible that life's features were designed, we would have to abandon the conclusion of design. Darwin would have been in the position of attempting to prove that a claim is not true, rather than trying to explain what was true. His attempts to prove that design was impossible may have become significant in the realm of philosophy, but I doubt they would have formed a scientific hypothesis that developed into a larger explanatory theory. If Darwin had taken this position, which is the negative approach he challenges his opponents to take, I think it is safe to conclude that Darwin's own thesis would have never been developed and he would not have become a significant figure in the history of science.

(Chap.2, p.26)

I'll post more later.

I think that abandoning Darwinism (or explicitly relegating it where it belongs, in the refinement and tuning of existing forms) sounds anti-scientific. They fear that the tenants of intelligent design and the creationists (people I hate as much as they do) will rejoice and quote them as being on their side. They really fear that, so they are prudent, some in good faith, some for calculated fear of being cast out of the scientific community.

How does one develop hatred for those he has never met and knows nothing about other than the singular belief they hold? I'll bet if some critics were fed truth serum and asked if they hate serial murderers like Ted Bundy they would reply in the negative. Yet… Let me bring a fear to fruition. There was this quote:

Look, when Sherman stresses that the sea urchin has, in-expressed, the genes for the eyes and for antibodies (genes that are well known and fully active in later species), how can we not agree with him that canonical neo-Darwinism cannot begin to explain such facts?

Gotta love it. You'd think the man was a double agent posing as an ID hater when he is advancing front loading with a side comment. How about this one?

Of course, there is natural selection all around us (just think of the flu virus, mutating and adapting every year, to our detriment) and inside us (just think of our antibodies and our synapses and the pancreas cells and the epithelial cells). The point is, however, that organisms can be modified and refined by natural selection, but that is NOT the way new species and new classes and new phyla originated.

For that, major changes in regulatory genes and in gene regulatory networks have to occur. All this is perfectly naturalistic and now well documented. Minor changes in the order of activation of master genes can create vast discontinuous morphogenetic changes. Very similar (in the jargon orthologous) genes in insects and in vertebrates produce an inversion in the development of the nervous system.

I don't understand this man. Follow this reasoning and tell me what I'm missing.

Major changes in regulatory genes and in gene regulatory networks have taken place naturally but not through natural selection right? Piattelli-Palmarini believes that genomes code for proteins involved in biological functions. He knows mutations occur yet discounts selection as an explanation for new species. He also disavows intelligent design and creation. So how did new species come about or is this how gaps are created?

Or consider the computer. Today’s computers are more sophisticated than computers from the 1950s, allowing people to design programs that allow you and me to communicate with great ease and little cost. Why is it that programmers seem to be able to do more with computers today than they could in the 1950s? Is it because today’s designers are smarter than yesterday? Have new laws of nature been discovered? Or does it have something to do with an observation from Hartwell et al.?

An early stored-program computer (left), built around 1950, used vacuum tubes in logic circuits, whereas modern computers use transistors and silicon wafers (right), but both are based on the same principles.

So again, to what degree is the design of a designer constrained by his/her building material? Furthermore, since natural selection can act as a designer-mimic, wouldn’t it too be subject to similar limitations?

http://www.edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf

I found this:

There's famous set of experiments from about ten years ago when Albert Eschenmoser, a brilliant Swiss synthetic chemist, set out to prove why
nature had a select DNA. With enormous Swiss skill and manpower he set
students out to make DNA-like molecules using different sugars, one after the
other, expecting that in every instance he would fail. But in fact he succeeded and
he found that different sugars in many cases was superior to DNA. They had
greater stability; they had fewer complications in replication.
I thought that he would arrange to have the Swiss government declare that from
now on every Swiss life form would adapt his symbiosis and dispense with DNA
as quickly as possible. There's PAN, and someone else came up with TNA —
there's endless ones — and so to me DNA is probably what evolution stumbled
upon through accident, and it's the easiest thing that could be come upon by slow
trial and error that would make a molecule that could be replicated by proteins
and that's how it came into being.

If Shapiro is correct, I think this would be quite a challenge to ID. So I've started looking to see if I could find more on this. So far, all I've found is this article:

http://discovermagazine.com/1993/aug/unnaturalacts254

which suggests that ribose and other pentoses are optimal. Since I know next to nothing about chemistry (or science), I thought I would just toss this out there to see if anyone else knows more about this.

But let's keep it confined to RIBOSE or the other sugars. Mike has already addressed cytosine in his book.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

HERE

HT: UD

So this is a follow-up thread for continuing a very interesting discussion, more than a week after the memorial day has passed. I hope nobody minds me taking up space, but Nullasalus offered a response I'd like to address, and I cannot do it there.

From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come. Let us ponder these possibilities in turn.

Where Are They?
Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

Most design theorists are uncomfortable talking about the designer. Wedgocentric analysis has demonstrated this reluctance to be part of a sinister plot to foist a theocracy on an unsuspecting, scientifically-illiterate, Bush-electing public. If intelligent design is to be recognized for the science that it is, it must eschew this deception and show the scientific community the designer.

It has been proven that the bacterial flergeller was designed. It is so complex that it must have been designed. It’s not just complex; it’s really, really complex. Think of the most complex thing you can think of. Well, the bacterial flergeller is way more complex than that. Ergo, it could not possibly have come together in a tornado, so it just had to be designed.

Since designers must be in the vicinity of their designs, I hypothesized that a simple survey of flergeracated bacterium would turn up the designer, sooner or later. I decided to look through 1 x 10^150 bacterial colonies in the hope of detecting the designer.

The following is a re-enactment of the study I completed.

Results

The investigator looked at 3 plates/day for 120 days in the hope of seeing the designer. Since each plate contained approximately 300 colonies, a total of 1.08 x 10^5 colonies were looked at. No positive colonies were scored. Discouraged by the idea of screening through another 145 plates, a minor adjustment in the methodology was made (see Methods).

After appropriate set up, the investigator began to sense the designer was near late one night when no one was in the lab. The investigator quickly secured plate #112 with bacteria (Figure 1). The investigator heard a faint sound coming from plate. A closer look at the plate showed nothing unusual (Figure 2).

The plate was returned to the bench when the sound was heard again. This time, the investigator took the plate and put it under a dissecting scope (Figure 3). As can be seen from the re-enactment, a faint blue dot was seen on one of the colonies.

At this point, the investigator pulled out the special designer-detecting instrument and used it to enhance the image of the scope. Something clearly was on the colony (Figure 4), but the image was oddly blurred, as if the designer was trying to hide.

The investigator then took his two hands, rubbed his eyes three times, waited precisely 12 seconds, and looked again. This time, the designer was identified as clearly seen in the re-enactment shown in Figure 5.

Discussion

The designer has been seen by at least one investigator. With this growing consensus, it is time to introduce design into the public high schools. Future studies will attempt to make contact with the designer.

Methods

100 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide was consumed by the investigator prior to sceening bacteria plates. After a delay of 10 minutes, 100 ml of 95% ethanol was also added to the investigator. The designer-detecting instrument (DDI) was constructed by purchasing a magnifying lens from K-Mart and sending it to Venetian Way Holdings Inc. for a blessing. The DDI can be used in conjunction with any standard dissecting scope by using it while looking through the eye pieces.

There are two ways of analyzing the role of proteins. Proteins illustrate the interdependence of cellular functions and the dependence of cells on the proper coordination of its separate parts. That in turn is evidence of downward causation- a paradigm favorable to ID.

But we could continue to approach the matter of life's origin solely from a reductionist perspective. After all reductionism has led to success in other fields and provides an inductive argument for its continued utilization in origin of life research. Spinning wheels can keep an occupant in the same place but rabbits have another means of advancing.