Intelligent design/claims

ID has made the following falsifiable claims:

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wikipage=Issuepedia:Debaticons tooltip=claim that is the main subject of a debate img_src=Image:Arrow-button-rt-20px.png img_alt=right arrow debaticon </linkedimage> Certain organisms display what ID proponents call "irreducible complexity", i.e. organs which they claim would not function properly if even a small percentage of their components were absent or not functioning properly, and therefore these organs could not have evolved due to the non-adaptiveness of the non-functioning intermediate steps.

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wikipage=Issuepedia:Debaticons tooltip=claim that is the main subject of a debate img_src=Image:Arrow-button-rt-20px.png img_alt=right arrow debaticon </linkedimage> The flagellum, which is actually a molecular motor with "about 50 parts", would cease to function properly if even just a few of those parts were absent.

Dr. Kenneth Miller shows a sample organism which is missing 40 of the 50 parts and yet still functions "perfectly". ID proponents have yet to produce an example for which this argument holds up.

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wikipage=Issuepedia:Debaticons tooltip=claim that is the main subject of a debate img_src=Image:Arrow-button-rt-20px.png img_alt=right arrow debaticon </linkedimage> Life could not have evolved by chance, according to mathematician Dr. William Dembski of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, due to the vast improbability of functioning sequences of DNA happening to occur out of all the vast number of possible alternatives.

This is based on two mistaken understandings:

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wikipage=Issuepedia:Debaticons tooltip=erroneous or logically inconsistent statement in main argument img_src=Image:Button-e!-20px.png img_alt=e! debaticon </linkedimage> Error: The probability of any given genome (DNA sequence for an organism) happening to occur is the same as that of any other genome, i.e. they happen at random.

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wikipage=Issuepedia:Debaticons tooltip=correction, or corrected version of earlier statement img_src=Image:Button-check-20px.png img_alt=check mark debaticon </linkedimage> Correction: This would only be true if each organism had been first created in something close to its present form. The theory of evolution posits that the genomes for each species evolved gradually over millions of years, starting from the shortest possible strands which could reproduce and gradually being edited over the eons by natural selection – adding on a bit here, trimming a bit there – until we arrive at all the different organisms there are today. Hence DNA sequences (like any engineering project, or like writing) tend to follow certain patterns which are a vanishingly small subset of all the possible patterns. Genomes which actually work as organisms are an even smaller subset of genomes which are constructed mainly of patterns in common use.

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wikipage=Issuepedia:Debaticons tooltip=erroneous or logically inconsistent statement in main argument img_src=Image:Button-e!-20px.png img_alt=e! debaticon </linkedimage> Error: The DNA sequences found in organisms today were each created in their entirety, like a hand of cards being dealt, for the first organism to use them. There are only a vanishingly small number of "hands" (out of all the Vast number of possible hands) which might work as organisms, and the misunderstanding seems to be that we have from the beginning of life until now to "deal out" functioning organisms from a well-shuffled deck.

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wikipage=Issuepedia:Debaticons tooltip=correction, or corrected version of earlier statement img_src=Image:Button-check-20px.png img_alt=check mark debaticon </linkedimage> Correction: Again, the patterns started out being relatively simple, and gradually evolved into the complex forms we see today.

A legitimate question to ask is how that first pattern could have been created, since the "simplest pattern capable of copying itself" would seem to be quite complicated, but that discussion is outside the realm of evolution by natural selection (EbNS). Many of the mechanisms found in EbNS play a large part in abiogenesis theories, however, and much work has been done towards creating abiogenesis in the laboratory.