Re: What points to the ID scam?

On 03-Mar-25 22:30, erik simpson wrote:

On 3/3/25 4:39 PM, RonO wrote:

On 2/27/2025 1:03 PM, RonO wrote:
SNIP:
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Aside from the nothing that the ID scam seems to be at this time except bait to attract creationist rubes so that they can sell them the obfuscation and denial switch scam the ID perps have this article up demonstrating that they really do not have any valid science supporting the ID scam at this time.
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The article is written by Sewell who is notable as being the ID perp that dropped IC and the Cambrian explosion out of the Top Six and placed the others out of order so that he could try to continue to fool the creationist rubes with the stupidity.  The views are supposed to be those of an ID perp that came from New Mexico.  The Top Six god- of-the-gaps denial have never supported Biblical creationism.  This article still tries to include most of them.
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https://evolutionnews.org/2025/02/michael-kent-12-discoveries-that- have-changed-the-debate-about-design/
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First off these are not recent discoveries.  The false ones never had any valid discoveries associated with them, and the standard gap denial ones were likely discovered over half a century ago.  It should also be noted that the New Mexico ID Network has been defunct for over a decade and a half.  Enough of the IDiots dropped out so that the New Mexico ID Network closed down after Dover.  It took this guy 20 years to produce this bogus slide presentation.
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1. The universe (space-time, matter, energy) had a beginning.
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How long ago has it been since the Big Bang was validated?  As sad as it may be the Big Bang is not Biblical, and it is one of the science topics that IDiotic creationists have wanted to drop from the public school science standards.  They succeeded in Kansas in 1999, but failed in other states like Texas and Oklahoma, but that doesn't mean that they didn't try.  That should tell you how much #1 has meant to the ID scam. Nothing but bait, and stale unattractive bait.  Also #1 of the Top Six evidences for IDiocy.
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2. The laws of physics, the fundamental constants, and the initial conditions of the universe are fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life.
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The need for fine tuning has likely never been demonstrated, but things are what they are, and if things were different, things would be different.  Also #2 of the Top Six
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3. Protein sequence space is far too large to be searched and highly functional sequences (i.e., enzymes) are incredibly rare (~ 1 in 1077).
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This is likely not true as stated.  What has been determined is that life has only needed a very small fraction of the total protein sequence space to produce what it needs to have a functional life form.  We know for a fact that functional sequences are not that rare because of things like Abzyme research where they can evolve new enzymatic function during an immune response where fewer than 10^12 sequences could possibly be searched during the immune response.  This means that only a very small portion of the existing protein sequence space has been needed to be searched to produce what is needed. It is why gene duplication has obviously been so successful in producing proteins with new functions. The existing sequences need to be changed only a little in order to do something different.
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4. The number of genes in the simplest free-living organism is about 450.
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So what?  These are the genes needed for the life form that developed the genetic code and represent the genes needed to support that genetic code and replicate the whole system.  Before the genetic code existed life forms would not have needed so many genes.  What does it matter how many genes are needed for extant life forms?  Does it matter how many genes are needed to produce a designer capable of producing the current life forms using "special creation"?
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5. Life is based on a digital information processing system.
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This is false.  Life might be better claimed to be a type of analog system.  It is the 3D structures of the proteins that do things, and the RNA structural genes are not digital, but rely on secondary structures that can be produced by the RNA sequences.  Just think of how many systems rely on concentrations of gene products in order to function. Peptide hormones have to be processed and need to exist at certain concentrations before they can effectively regulate the systems that they turn on and off.
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6. Molecular machines and sophisticated software algorithms are essential to all life-forms.
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This is also likely false.  If the ID perps could write out any software algorithms essential for life they would probably have something to add to science.  Since they can't do that, and there isn't any software known that life uses, this seems to be some made up bogus notion.
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I should note that 3, 4, 5 and 6 are included in #3 of the Top Six the origin of life.
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7. Random mutation + natural selection has severe limitations as a creative mechanism that are now well understood.
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How long have we understood that natural selection is not the only creative mechanism in the biology of life on earth?  The neutral theory was established in the 1970's, but the guys proposing the molecular clock in the 1960's were already claiming that most amino acid sequence changes that we could observe seemed to be neutral.  The proteins sequences were different between species, but they still accomplished what they needed to do in that species.  Behe's 3 neutral mutations needed to infer design rely on the fact that neutral mutations exist and can evolve to do things in combination with other neutral mutations. The ID perps were told that their scam nonsense that they got other "scientists" to sign claiming that random mutations and natural selection were not enough to account for the diversity of life on earth, was incomplete and essentially dishonest decades ago.  This guy should know better by now.  There are biologists that think that genetic drift has more to do with the diversity of life than natural selection.
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This was not included in the Top Six, likely because it is misleading and basically dishonest as written.
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8. So many highly improbable factors make Earth habitable that it is VERY unlikely that another truly “Earth-like” planet exists in our galaxy.
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This is part of #2 of the Top Six (fine tuning).  Sewell also divided #2 into two pieces, but the original Top Six included the creation of our planet to support life in the fine tuning "evidence".  Denton acknowledges that what happened could have just happened.  It obviously took 8 billion years to produce the right environment and the elements needed to make our planet in the region of space that our solar system formed in, but there is absolutely no evidence that any designer was needed to make that happen in our part of the galaxy.
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9. The “junk DNA” paradigm has been shown to be false. Most, if not all, non-coding DNA has function.
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This statement is false as written, and likely why it was not part of the Top Six.  Most of the sequence in our genomes is transposon or retroviral sequence or old inactive mutated transposon or retroviral sequence. These are DNA parasites or parasitic remnants and included in what is called junk DNA.  That this is true has never been falsified.
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I should note that he doesn't include the flagellum as a designed machine (#4 of the Top Six).  Sewell also dropped out #4.  No one wants Behe to identify a designer doing anything to evolve a flagellum with his 3 neutral mutations over a billion years ago.
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10. The Cambrian (and other) explosions in the fossil record are not consistent with the Darwinian model of gradual evolution.
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This is #5 of the Top Six and one of them that Sewell dropped out of his version of the list.  My guess is that this guy doesn't understand that gradualism isn't what it used to be, and even Darwin understood that change could occur very rapidly with his examples of domestic animals. I just put up a thread on Mollusc evolution, and whatever the designer did during the Cambrian explosion, it looks like he used evolution from a common ancestor to do it.  Mollusca may have separated from Annalids just before the Cambrian explosion, and they did diversify during the Cambrian explosion, but a lot of the diversification came much later. Octopus and Squids did not evolved until after the Permian extinction 250 million years ago.  It doesn't matter because if the ID perps ever do determine that some designer was involved in the Cambrian explosion the ID perps would lose their major support base which has always been YEC.  There is no events that occurred over half a billion years ago that most of the IDiots will accept.  The Big Tent was always a lie to con the rubes into supporting the ID scam.
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11. Extensive post-translational processing (editing) of genes occurs in eukaryotes: the spliceosome and the splicing code.
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Why would a designer do this?  Prokaryotes mainly have genes without introns.  Some eukaryotes still have self spicing RNA transposable elements.  They can integrate into a coding sequence, and be a parasite that needs to be maintained because if it is damaged the correct coding sequence will never be produced.  This seems to indicate that introns may be past parasitic DNA sequences that made themselves invaluable to the lifeform.  Functional introns need to be maintained or the correct coding sequence is not made.  Why is this evidence for design?  It is an extra step that obviously is not needed for the most efficient genomes. It has been proposed to be something that could be used to rapidly evolve new protein sequences by mixing different exons, but that would be suicide for the ID perps that do not want biological evolution to be possible.  Why would a designer need to invent introns when he is supposed to have not used biological evolution to create the diversity of life on earth.  Most of the ID perps are anti-evolution and all of their YEC political support is anti-evolution.
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12. Genes extensively overlap in the same or opposite directions within a stretch of DNA (overlapping codes).
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This is just dumb.  I learned about overlapping genes in a molecular biology class at Berkeley in the 1970's.  They were no mystery.  Some virus (they had very small genomes) contained sequence that allowed run over into another gene, usually because they were encoded on a different reading frame (three base code, three reading frames per sequence).  No big mystery, just what worked for that virus.  You have to acknowledge the small amount of sequence space that has been explored, and yet functional proteins required for life obviously exist.  We have identified major splice variants that include two different genes so that exons from one gene are spliced onto another.  This actually makes a new gene while still retaining both original functional genes.  It seems to be just another way that genes evolve.
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One of the neat things that has been proposed is that the two types of charging enzymes (aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase) that put the right amino acid onto specific tRNAs.  One is needed to charge each different family of tRNA with the correct amino acid.  There are two types and some ancient sequence has been conserved in both types of aminoacyl- tRNA synthetases.  This highly conserved sequence is obviously needed for the function of both types of synthetases, but the amino acid sequence is encoded by the two different anti-parallel strands.  The synthetases evolved by gene duplication for each family, but the two families initially evolved from a single sequence where one protein was encoded on one strand and the other from the complementary strand.  All the other synthetases evolved from these original two by gene duplication. More than 20 synthetases are needed because some amino acids have more than one type of anti-codon sequence associated with the tRNA.  The common ancestor of all life on earth had ancestors that needed to evolve all the synthetases required to evolve the current universal genetic code.  This means that there were ribozymes that likely were used to create all the synthetases required to charge the tRNAs, but that after the genetic code had evolved and proteins could be synthesized with high fidelity, the extant protein synthetases evolved to replace the ribozyme synthetases.  All the existing proteins that do things that the pregenetic code lifeform needed to do are replacements.  Enzymes not based on amino acid sequences were likely doing those jobs before the genetic code evolved.
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It should be noted that this fellow doesn't think much about the gaps in the fossil record (#6 of the Top Six), and did not include it as one of his best evidences for the ID scam.
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It is pretty sad that this is all the ID perps can put up at this time as supporting the ID creationist scam.
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Ron Okimoto
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I've never understood the need for the ID proponents to prove that evolution is wrong.  Certainly God could have done it that way, and do they actually assert that he couldn't? My brother in law is a YEC, and doesn't accept the larger God that can play with billions of years.

ID proponentsists need evolution to be wrong for two reasons: A lot of folks can't stand the idea that they're related to nonhuman apes, and a lot of folks can't stand the idea that they're related to Black folks. Theistic evolution doesn't solve either of those problems.
The need NOT to share a lineage with people of different skin colors is one of the dirtiest secrets of creationism. The early evolution-deniers were mostly polygenists, like Louis Agassiz: They believed Adam and Eve were white northern Europeans, and other "races" must have had wholly separate ancestors.
I highly recommend Gould's *The Mismeasure of Man* on this topic; while it isn't primarily about creationism, there's a lot of overlap in personnel, goals, and methods between the creationists and the biological determinists. (Insert the "it's the same picture" meme here.)
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Kestrel Clayton
"Every normal woman must be tempted, at times, to stoke the fire,
host the black mass, and begin eating hearts." — Rose Bailey