You obviously aren’t cut out to be an evolutionist. The improbability of life being accidently transported from one planet to another is no obstacle to evolutionists. Nothing is too unlikely when it comes to fabricating stories to support accidental creation. Process structuralism you see discounts chance as the creative force behind life, the universe, and everything and replaces it with highly constraining natural laws. As law becomes more constrained and specific it tends to make people think there was a creator with a purpose behind those laws. Nothing is too absurd if it contests that horrible thought. The height of the absurd lengths they’ll go to is seriously speculating about the existence of 10^500 different universes, all spawned by accident, all with different laws that govern how they operate, and we just happen to be in one where the laws were such that life was possible. Therefore I predict that, should DNA based life be found on Mars, contamination will be given precedence over structuralism as the best explanation. Normally they’d go for the standard contrivation – convergent evolution. If you rewound the tape on chance evolution, don’t you know, it wouldn’t come out the same way again. Except in cases where it does come out the same way again, then we call that convergent evolution. Chance, you see, explains everything. I’m beginning to think that “chance” is just the word atheists use for “God”. Instead of saying “God did it” like religious folk they say “chance did it” and don’t capitalize “chance” to hide the fact it’s an object of worship for them.

If life were found on Mars and it was based on the same genetic code as life on earth that wouldn’t really bolster ID nor would it detract from it in my opinion. It would add weight to non-Darwinian theories of evolution such as process structuralism and similar theories where life is constrained to limited forms by physical law. The most likely explanation I think would be that Mars was contaminated with life that first appeared on the Earth. The notion that life is inevitable wherever conditions are marginally suitable has become quaint – good stuff for science fiction plots but not in the real world.

In the book “Life Itself” (1981) Francis Crick (Nobel Prize winning discover of DNA) wrote:

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.

Nothing has changed since 1981 that diminishes Crick’s statement. In fact, in light of knowledge gained since 1981, the difficulties in chemical evolution are far greater than Crick knew. Crick had a hard time believing that even the earth could have been the place where life began.

For reasons that are tangentially related to ID I think Mars, the rest of our solar system, and anywhere else we’ll ever be able to look are as sterile as Pasteur’s flasks. This is a radical change in opinion for me as I used to take the Copernican Principle of Mediocrity as gospel. But an honest man must go where the evidence leads. SETI has found nothing but a sterile universe after 40 years of looking. 55 years after Miller-Urey managed to create three of 22 amino acids in vitro there’s really no significant progress in experimental demonstration of chemical evolution. The Copernican Principle of Medicrity now appears to me to be wrong. Unlike many people I had no religious experience or conversion that changed my thinking in this regard. It’s entirely due to what science has discovered (or failed to discover as the case may be).

The question was about ID Theorists, not ID. And as I stated above (see comments 16 & 18) from “The Privileged Planet” we can get at least one prediction- that is the factors that allow for our existence will be present for another planet with intelligent life.

Until you or anyone else can start accounting for the physiological and anatomical differences observed between chimmps and humans via genetic differences, then you have nothing but speculation based on the assumption of UCD.

Convergence explains similarities just as well as divergence- and that is within the UCD paradigm.

Common mechanism could readily explain that. That is similar sequences of DNA are subject to similar mutations.

We are not dealing with “similar” mutations here, we are dealing with identical mutations.

There are only 4 nucleotide possibilities. And similar mutations would include identical mutations.

If you compare the chimp and human genes side by side, there will be some differences, but there is a clear alignment.

No one has done that yet.

When a particular gene has say 300 nucleotide bases, and exactly one is hit with a particular change, the chance of that happening randomly is very small.

Nonsense. We know there are mutational “hot spots”.

And what is the testable hypothesis for UCD? How about UCD via genetic accidents?

It was also nice of you to avoid the rest of my post:

ID does NOT say that random effects are not present. And ID does NOT say that disease causing mutations cannot occur.

And your point mutations only support UCD if you have already assumed it. Until you can account for all the differences observed it is obvious yours is a position of speculation based on the assumption.

It is untestable and unfalsifiable.

Ya see bFast, as I posted in comment 42, sexual reproduction put an end to UCD. That is because half of each genome is discarded and there isn’t any guarantee that any mutation- not matter how beneficial- will get passed on.

IOW reality does a good job of refuting UCD.

Common mechanism could readily explain that. That is similar sequences of DNA are subject to similar mutations.

We are not dealing with “similar” mutations here, we are dealing with identical mutations. If you compare the chimp and human genes side by side, there will be some differences, but there is a clear alignment. Where point mutations are conserned the alignment is really easy to find. Where insertions and deletions occur, it gets a little more difficult. However, on many of these genes there are only point mutations. When a particular gene has say 300 nucleotide bases, and exactly one is hit with a particular change, the chance of that happening randomly is very small. However, you do have a testable hypothesis. If your hypothesis, that paraticular specific locations in the DNA are vulnerable to specific mutations, this should be testable. What happens when this unlikely hypothesis is tested and found wanting?

However why would natural selection keep 800 disease causing mutations over all the alleged generations?

First, all of these point mutations are in ressive genes. In resessive genes, a destructive point mutation has very little evolutionary pressure because it only shows in the phenotype when two individuals carrying the same mutation get together. Therefore, for the most part, these drift in the genome very like random drift. The genome is very poor at purging desctructive point mutations.

Additionally, there are hundreds of disease-causing point mutations that exist in humans and not in chimps. There are hundreds that exist in chimps and not in humans. Of both of these varieties, the point mutation also exists in gorillas. The conclusion drawn is that the mutation existed prior to the CA of the gorilla and the human/chimp lineage, and that the mutation was purged from the human or chimp lines respectively.

With reguards to these disease causing point mutations, they seem to me to do a good job of following the expectations of chance in the genome, and they do a good job of supporting common descent. Specifically, they do a good job of supporting common descent above common design.

The OOL question. A problem for both natural and artificial (ID) abiogenesis btw. How does one assemble a living cell from scratch?

I take it that you have never designed anything in your entire life.

I say that because anyone who has, has the understanding that they know what they are designing and what it takes to get it done.

To Tom MH-

Amd in the ID scenario the tRNA knows what it is doing.

That’s anthropomorphizing.

No, that is telling it like it is.

Unless you wish to maintain that tRNA posesses awareness?

It does. It posesses the awareness that was programmed into it. The awareness to grab the proper amino acid, bring it to the right place and then let it go, all at a given time.

What’s your explanation? tRNA just does what it does…

And how do cells get there from a cold start? By design. Duh…