Jim's First Response:
Let's Get Detailed!

Intelligent Design, I would define this way: all the organisms that we observe today were designed by someone (or something, or some group of things) that was (and maybe still is) intelligent. All organisms were created in essentially their current form, but not necessarily all at the same time. Their genes were designed with a certain amount of extra information that creates variations between individuals, so that populations can adapt, to a limited extent, to changes in their environment.

Now, with those definitions, let's make some predictions. I'm going to list predictions of both theories in several areas, to emphasize the point that Intelligent Design is at least as valid a scientific theory as Evolution. If you would like to add more predictions that Evolution makes, I'll add corresponding predictions for Intelligent Design.

1. Fossils

A. Evolution predicts that the fossil record will be full of innumerable transitional forms of organisms that show the slow progression from simple forms to increasingly complex forms. From fish to amphibian, from amphibian to reptile, from land mammal to aquatic mammal, etc.

B. Intelligent Design predicts that organisms will appear in the fossil record fully formed, and will remain relatively unchanged until they go extinct or until the present time.
(Note that neither theory really predicts how many or how few fossils will be found. That's a question for geology more than for life-origin theories.)

The most notable aspect of the fossil record, for ID'ers, is the Cambrian explosion. Before that, there was only single-celled life. [Long theorized, and predicted by evolution, soft-bodied Precambrian worms have been recently discovered. This completely matches the claims by scientists that fossils from this time are very hard to come by. Scientists have also found the primitive Precambrian ancestor to the mollusk. It has a foot, but no shell, early sponges, and arthropod embryos. They have also found fossilized tunnels from worm like creatures. This is all between 10 and 60 million years before the Cambrian period. This is how long ago the large dinosaurs went extinct so there is plenty of time to evolve into the explosion. New species appear throughout the fossil record and are sometimes linked to their soft bodied ancestors. These ancestors are very rare since it is unlikely they will fossilize. Further, in the three most famous Cambrian sites, Greenland, China, and Canada, there is a growing diversification of life matching the age difference of the three sites, roughly 5 million years between each. This is completely consistent with evolution. How does ID explain the length of time it took to create the Cambrian explosion? 15 million years is eternity to an intelligence capable of creating a human.] Then, all of a sudden (in geologic terms), hundreds of diverse and complex life forms appeared. These included trilobites, with fully-formed eyes very similar to modern ones. There is no fossil evidence of any intermediate steps leading up to trilobite eyes or any of the other biodiversity. [Even today there are creatures with very simplified eyes that are consistent with eyes having evolved. The fossil record also shows eyes of greater and lesser complexity. If eyes are made, why make inferior ones?] So, this seems much more consistent with the theory that all these forms of life were designed and created at about the same time, than with the theory that they slowly evolved over millions of years. This pattern is repeated with the sudden appearance and disappearance of the dinosaurs. [Slow evolution is largely dead. I don’t think any scientist today believes that evolution can only happen slowly. There are too many examples of rapid evolution in the fossil record, in laboratory experiments, and witnessed in the real world. We know a sudden change in climate and environment killed the dinosaurs. We are almost certain it was a meteor that hit the Caribbean. New England is known for all of its deciduous trees that change colors in the fall. New England used to be covered in White Pine. Settlers cut down all the pines and the deciduous trees rushed in to fill the void. We know there were mammals living with the dinosaurs, but were mostly niche animals. When many of the dinosaurs died they swept in. Mammals and small dinosaurs survived.] Evolution theorizes that amphibians evolved from fish. This means that at some point there must have been some creature that would be classified as a fish which gave birth to a creature that would be classified as an amphibian. [Only by assuming that nature really lives in our convenient categories.] Obviously, the parent and offspring would have been very, very similar, somewhere in between a fish and an amphibian, and the offspring of the offspring would have continued to change over many more generations until they looked like modern amphibians. The ID'ers point is that there should be lots of fossils that are hard to classify because they are somewhere in between fish and amphibians. [Well, there are. I assume by lots of fossils we are talking in relative terms. Fossils are extremely rare themselves. We have many pre-humans, proto-humans, proto-chimps, where does Australopithecus fit? The reason there is no missing link is because there are many. Even today, where does the Platypus fit? The walking catfish? The mudskipper? Genetics are causing biologists to reclassify species into new families because even today it is hard to properly classify anything.] But we have found many fossilized fish and amphibians, but no such intermediate forms between the two. So the fossil evidence suggests that there was no evolution, and that both fish and amphibians were designed and created. [On this entire planet Darwin had to go to one extremely remote spot to see evolution. To be fair, he went to several but one spot is so famous. Now, compare that rarity to the fossil record and even Darwin did not predict we would find so much. We have found fossils that are not one, nor the other. Have we found any that are exactly half way? I don’t know, and I don’t think it really matters. If I see a train go into a tunnel, and then come out the other end, I don’t assume a new train was created in between. And many of these tunnels are very short. Not only does evolution predict we will find these transitional species, but tells us how deep to dig and in what strata to look. It is remarkably accurate. Scientists decide they want to find the predecessor to birds, figure out about how long ago to look, what areas would be good to look, and when one of these creatures are found that IDers dismiss as not being a missing link, it is right where it was predicted to be unless geology decided to play games and toss the site around.]


2. Genetics

A. Evolution predicts that DNA similarity between organisms should reflect their common ancestry. Reptiles should be more genetically similar to all other reptiles than to any birds or mammals, because all reptiles evolved from one reptile ancestor. Apes and humans should be more genetically similar to each other than to anything else, because they share a more recent common ancestor with each other than with any other species. DNA analyses of various areas of the genetic code should generally point to one common evolutionary tree. So Evolution predicts that the more DNA analyses we do, the more they will reinforce the same evolutionary tree.

B. Intelligent Design predicts that DNA similarity between organisms should reflect their common design. Many organisms should share many genes, especially if they are designed to live in similar environments, or if they function in similar ways. But the relationships will probably not fit into one common tree. DNA analyses of various areas of the genetic code will show that organism A is most similar to organism B in some areas but most similar to organism C in other areas. Some genes, such as the genes for eyes, which almost all organisms need, will be shared among vastly different organisms, like humans and squid. So Intelligent Design predicts that the more DNA analyses we do, the more different relationships we should find, including some that link organisms which appear to be vastly different.

We mentioned briefly before that human insulin is most similar to that of pigs, while our immune system is most similar to a rat's, while structurally, we are obviously most similar to apes. If humans and apes shared a common ancestor more recent than their common ancestor with any other animal, then all of our genes should be more similar to those of apes than those of pigs or rats or anything else. [If all our genes were the same as apes, we would be apes. Our genes differ by a fairly small amount. All living things are something like %30 the same. The number of variations in genetics is finite. It is not remarkable that given a finite number of variations there will be matches with very distant relations. Somewhere on this planet is a car with the same numbers and letters in its license plate as on mine. This is not astonishing and does not mean we are related.] Whales are another example cited by ID'ers. Evolutionists once believed that whales evolved from Ambulocetus and several other extinct fox-like creatures. But then DNA analysis showed that whales were much more genetically similar to hippos than to the family that Ambulocetus belongs to (whose name I forget). Since various DNA analyses have produced very different evolutionary trees than morphological analyses and other DNA analyses, genetics supports common design much better than it supports common ancestry. [Dr Tavison of Sweden,( I only know his name because it is a name I have used for years believing I made it up), about 4 years ago discovered a fossil that linked Hippos to Whales. How would IDers explain why a whale has knees? It’s a foolish waste of time to add something that has no use at all.]


3. Environmental effects

A. Evolution predicts that changes in the environment will create selective pressures, which will in turn cause organisms to evolve so that they are suited to the new environment.

B. Intelligent design predicts that when the environment changes, organisms will adapt as far as their genes allow, but the adaptation will be limited. If that limit is exceeded, they will simply become extinct.

To quote one of your earlier emails: "Why is there so much diversity of life when we know extinction is real?" We certainly have observed many species become extinct, usually due to changes in the environment. We have not observed any new species evolve. [That is not true. The first artificial species were created in the 1920s, and scientists have observed the formation of new species in the wild. Mice on the island of Madeira have evolved into 6 new species over the course of only 500 years completely naturally. Apparently along I-80 there is a new species that was artificially created. Fruit flies have been evolved into new species by climate change, artificial culling, and changing the process of natural selection.] Thus, the pattern that we see is one of always-decreasing biodiversity. Extrapolating this pattern forward and back in time suggests that a very wide variety of life was created at some time in the past, and that without intervention, all of it will eventually become extinct. This supports intelligent design, and not Evolution. [If diversity is eventually going give way to extinction and there is no new speciation, then where is the Precambrian hippo or T Rex or human or house fly? Where did these new species come from after the dinosaurs? Why are there creatures that look like they are between animal types, but don’t have fossil records to show they were there from the beginning nor around long enough to be much more than a transition? Why is the life in Australia so much different than anywhere else on earth? Evolution says it is because of extreme isolation, but if there was one designer, wouldn’t isolation be irrelevant? Why does the fossil record show a growth of diversification rather than a decline? Why is life more complex the longer life has been on the planet?]


4. Irreducible complexity

A. Evolution predicts that organisms evolve through long sequences of small mutations. Thus all the complexity and diversity of life that we observe must have arisen through many, many steps, every one of which produced a survival advantage. If any structure or system that we observe is irreducibly complex, meaning that it could not have arisen through this process, then Evolution is falsified. So, obviously, Evolution predicts that no such structure or system will be discovered.

B. Irreducible complexity is very typical of things designed by human intelligence. A computer, for example, must have at least an input device, a processing unit, and an output device in order to serve any purpose. A radio is an even more significant example. Not only does a radio receiver have a certain minimum number of parts, but even a complete receiver is useless by itself. There must be a radio transmitter, which is a completely separate and completely different machine, transmitting a signal for the receiver to pick up. Television is the same way. So, Intelligent Design predicts that we will observe many biological structures and systems, and even inter-special dependencies, that are irreducibly complex.

This seems to me to be one of the ID'ers strongest points. The bacterial flagellum certainly does seem to be an irreducibly complex electric motor. Of course, if it were the only example, we could dismiss it. But we observe apparently irreducible systems everywhere: eyes (of which there are several varieties)[We have both living examples today and fossil evidence that eyes have evolved. Therapsida is a lizard with a double joint jaw. The lower jaw is mammalian and the second joint bones have already begun shaping themselves into the tiny bones of the inner ear. Irreducible complexity is a valid concern if simpler steps are found that cannot have existed. So far, that has not been the case. Not having found all the steps does not mean there are none. In these examples, we have the steps. Irreducible Complexity also ignores factors such as strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, chemistry and the atomic structure. Sure there are millions of possibilities if only the combinatorial factor is considered, but hydrogen and oxygen will almost always make water if they get close together. This does not require a designer to make water. Proteins have preferred orientations just as atoms do.] , ears, the digestive system, the cardiovascular system (including the blood clotting mechanism, without which any organism would almost certainly bleed to death before reaching maturity), the musculoskeletal and nervous systems (which I put together because either of them would be useless without the other), wing-powered flight, sexual reproduction, etc. [If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory [of natural selection] would absolutely break down. – Darwin. I do not know the research state of every one of these points, but I do know that there is a lot of money and fame for the person who can point out a system that violates Darwin’s statement. Digestive systems abound of simple types like flies to astonishingly complex like a cow’s. Dinosaurs have been found with stones where their stomachs would be indicating they have the same digestive system birds have. Flying squirrels and snakes may be intermediate steps to flight; ostriches have feathers and wings, but don’t fly. Are they built by design? What I’ve often wondered, and science is beginning to answer this, did birds learn to fly jumping into a tree, or jumping out of a tree. It turns out to be most likely neither. Feathers are scales with hollows in it. It’s the same stuff. Some dinosaurs developed feathers to keep warm not to fly. As they ran around on the ground chasing prey, they started waving their arms to grab their food. The additional thrust from the feathered arms gave them an edge in feeding over those that did not. Those that ate more had more offspring who themselves evolved this flapping motion to catch prey. This edge became more and more powerful until one left the ground all together. Now, Evolution makes this prediction. If birds evolved from lizards trying to catch prey, their wing beat pattern should be one of reaching out to grab something and pulling it in. This is exactly the motion of a bird flap. Flightless birds should also flap their wings to help them run faster and maneuver better, which is exactly what happens. Does this make it the only answer? No, but it shows evolution made a prediction, it was studied in a lab using high speed cameras, and birds flying and animals grabbing are the same motion.] There are also inter-special dependencies, like bees and flowers, humans and intestinal bacteria, and wasps and figs. Now, in many of these cases, there are examples of similar but less complex things, like bacterial cilia for the flagellum, and the worm digestive system for the human digestive system. But all of these things would require not one or two, but thousands of intermediate steps to be developed through small, random mutations. It is difficult, if not impossible, to even imagine how every one of the thousands of intermediate steps could have provided a selective advantage. [I think the wing example is a good one where, even if it proves to be false, it is a great example of how unrelated advantages combine in the end to be a unique advantage that is greater than the sum. It’s also important to be aware that a change does not have to have any advantage to be there. Why are birds so colorful? There’s no advantage to being colorful except to attract a mate. On top of that, they had to evolve colored vision in order to take advantage of being colorful. I don’t know there is an answer. On the other hand, other species have adapted to the fact that birds see color. This is easy to imagine. Two salamanders are born, one with red stripes and one with green stripes. The birds eat all the green striped ones and leave the red ones because it looks like this other creature that is poisonous. It doesn’t take long for there to be no more green ones except in rare mutations that try to get that back.] And even if we could imagine it, we have not found any fossil evidence of the intermediate steps between wingless mice and winged bats. [Karen Sears, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, has discovered that the change from mice to bats is only one gene. This discovery was made less than a year ago, but explains why bats evolved so rapidly. Once this gene change occurred, the evolution to bats would have required very few transitions. Very few bat fossils exist at all though there are an enormous number of bats. Small + delicate + forest environments with acidic soils = low possibility of preservation. Many teeth have been found that link bat like teeth to hedgehogs, shrews, and moles, but we only have the teeth.] On top of that, according to the evolutionary tree, many of these systems must have evolved many times. For example, wing-powered flight must have evolved four times, in birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects. [If there is an intelligent designer, wouldn’t one mode be sufficient? Why create such different methods? Why give these methods to creatures that never use them? Evolution predicts exactly that there will be various ways to do anything. The more possible ways to fly there are, the more likely there will be flying creatures. The forms of motion that are most varied are also most common. There are more ways to walk than fly, and there are more walking creatures than flying. There are more ways to swim and so more swimming. Bats do not fly in a grabbing way. They flap up and down and let the leather wings change shape as they flap doing the work automatically that birds require a complex motion to accomplish. Why make things so hard on the birds?] There are at least five types of sexual reproduction. Eyes, according to one evolutionist, must have evolved between forty and sixty times. [and is still evolving. This is true with everything.]There are 300 known species of fig wasps, almost all of which pollinate one and only one species of fig tree! (The whole fig wasp thing is a truly astonishing story that deserves more discussion later.) [yeah, and fleas that only infest rabbits and reproduce at the same rate. There’s a lot of cool and astonishing things out there. I definitely share your awe.] So, because irreducible complexity appears to be astonishingly common, it supports intelligent design much better than Evolution. [Irreducible Complexity turns out to be not so irreducible. Doesn’t the enigma of bats speak more for evolution than for Intelligent Design? Why aren’t all creatures like bats in the fossil record? Wouldn’t a designer capable of such incredible complexity get things right the first time? Why have inferior stepping stones of digestive systems and eyes if you can just make a good one? Why do birds have to eat rocks to digest food? That’s incredibly primitive.]



Alright, I'll leave it there for now. If these points are scientific, then ID'ers do know at least something about science. [To my knowledge there is only one peer reviewed scientific paper on ID vs. Evolution. It has been shredded. The paper didn’t even support ID, just attacked Evolution. Two books have been written by scientists and have likewise been shown to have little basis. Irreducible complexity has been discredited in both the scientific community and the philosophy of science community. I didn’t even know the last community existed.] In fact, like I said, it seems to me that science is generally (maybe even completely) on their side. [To this, I of course completely disagree. I see it like this. Why is such a powerful being so slow, I mean 15 Million years? That’s a long time. Why so many failed experiments? If these things are not intermediary or transitional creatures, they must have been designed to do nothing particularly well. Why so much waste? Why do I have a tail bone? Why do I get goose bumps? Why do whales have the remnants of legs? Why do new creatures appear seemingly randomly? Why do these new creatures get more complicated with time? Is this intelligence learning as he goes? Why do we worry that small pox can evolve from cow pox? Why is some intelligent being messing around with mice on Madeira? Why make giraffe necks with the same number of vertebras as us? Couldn’t an intelligent designer predict that this would cause them problems drinking water? More vertebras would have let them bend their necks better.] I know you disagree, so how would you respond to each of these points? And what other points do you think support Evolution better than intelligent design? [There are two aspects of ID that I have troubles with. It makes the assumption that if we don’t know everything and see everything then there must be some designer to fill the gap. The second is the circular and largely negative arguments. For example, I could say that computers must have always existed because they are too complex to design without one. Well this is simply ridiculous. Of course we built up computers slowly over time adding complexity as we go. If we do this with things we create like radios and computers and houses, why assume an intelligent designer doesn’t do the same thing? And if there is an intelligent designer manipulating genes and natural selection in order to create a human from a pre-ape creature, it doesn’t make any difference to Evolutionists who is behind this system, just how to understand it and use it.] (If any of this sounds accusatory, I really don't mean it to be. I mean it to be calm and scientific. And I know this is another long one, so respond at your convenience.) [No offense taken or meant. I have learned a lot so far from just a few e-mails. I think this is fun.]


I'd like to make a quick addendum to my last email. Most of the things I discussed are more like explanations of things that have been observed rather than predictions about things that we will observe. (Of course, Evolution similar explains rather than predicts most of the time, as do many scientific theories.) [I find the explanations of ID to be more confusing than less. So much evidence that must be ignored, such inefficient design that must be accepted, a designer that is learning as he goes along, Leftover pieces that have no business in creatures that would never have used them. These do not make sense to me. There is a lot we do not know, but every time evolution predicts that we will find something at about this age, it’s there. I don’t mean that every time we look, we find, but rather that everything we find is right where it’s supposed to be. What evidence have we found that fits ID and not Evolution? Where has ID led us to find something not predicted by Evolution? ID and Evolution look at the same thing and agree. We have the same DNA, but the explanation of why is different. But where did Evolution fail to predict or explain a new finding? How did ID explain or, more importantly, predict that finding? I’m really curious because I have only seen proof through the lack of evidence. I have never seen evidence that contradicts Evolution.] But in reading through the ID literature, I've found that many ID proponents make a very scientifically testable prediction. We have found that only about 2-5% of DNA encodes for proteins. Evolution theorists have predicted that the other 95-98% of DNA is leftover junk from the haphazard evolutionary process. [That’s not entirely true. Evolutionists say that there is more to our DNA than is needed and posit that introns are necessary to help scramble genes. The introns are believed to be the scratch pad for evolution. This, in turn, allows evolutionary processes to develop that are more complex than just changing one thing at a time. It also allows for storage of a new sequence within the species that allows for transitional species. This has been studied in bacteria. Furthermore, the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology last year discovered that life did not begin with introns, but rather picked them up later. Quoting from the press release. “The CARB analysis shows that the probability of a modern intron's presence in an ancestral gene common to the genes studied is roughly 1 percent, indicating that the vast majority of today's introns appeared subsequent to the origin of the genes.” Why did a designer suddenly need a mechanism that aids evolution, was not needed in the beginning, and is seen to have changed over time? Also, who among Evolution theorists call any DNA junk? I can’t find where that started, just a bunch of scientists saying it’s not junk? We are finding uses for it, and the uses are to enable evolution.] ID proponents predict that the intelligent agent(s) would not have thrown so much garbage into the design. A few portions of DNA may have degraded since they were designed, in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, such as our broken vitamin C-production system. But since DNA is obviously very good at preserving itself, most of it should still be functional. Therefore, ID predicts that we will discover that most of that junk DNA is actually useful. [If all the DNA is from a designer and some DNA has been lost, shouldn’t IDers predict %100 of DNA is useful? Also, the second law of thermodynamics is often misused in this context. I could no more say that a mountain erodes due to thermodynamics. The closed system would have to encompass the entire universe, but at that scale the equations would be so complicated and chaotic as to be meaningless.] I would also like to point out that ID is often accused of trying to stifle scientific research by simply declaring that 'God did it,' but this is an example of ID suggesting avenues for further scientific research. All sorts of DNA experiments are going on right now, and I can't wait to find out what they discover. [Uses for so called junk DNA have been found, but since Evolution does not predict how much is used or not, Evolutionary microbiologists and cellular scientists are happily researching this area. Junk is a misnomer, but there is a lot of DNA that is not used as the blue print for a creature. It doesn’t mean it is junk, just used for something else. If there were a designer, wouldn’t all DNA be used for replication and any other use evidence that there is not a static design? ] If it turns out that most of our DNA really is useless junk, I'd be ready to abandon ID as a scientific theory. But if it turns out that most of it is useful, I think it would be strong evidence for the truth of ID. [How about if introns are found to be the mechanism behind many of the complexities in Evolution that have IDers puzzled?]


 That’s all for now. If you’re interested, I found www.pandasthumb.org very interesting.