Yes, and here is the quick use for the EF: did Musgrave purposely pull these sequences from the Venter sequences, an instance of design?

1. No law is known to be capable.

2. A minimum of 1920 informational bits seems to say so.

3. The specification is the marked overlap with the watermark along with Musgrave’s designation that the source of some of the information would be human. So using the EF we can be perfectly clear that Musgrave did intentionally pull from Venter.

Thought this comment was interesting. Can anyone respond to this?

“The authors are trying to explain this puzzle: They looked at cytochrome oxidiase c’ in 4 different species. In two of them, the active heme site had a very low redox potential, compared to the possible range found in 4-residue mutants. In the other two, it had a very high redox potential.

They then had 2 possible explanations:

1. For some reason we don’t yet know, a low redox potential for this protein is good in two of these species, but bad in the other two.

2. There is a magical force animating evolution, and this one study of one protein in 4 species overturns everything everybody thought they had learned about evolution over the past 150 years.

They chose the second.

The authors found that “redox potential” (just black-box that term and pretend we know what it means) of one protein was maximized in 2 organisms, and minimized in 2 other organisms.

They then reasoned:
We don’t know how redox potential affects the efficiency of ATP generation.
Therefore, we know that redox potential doesn’t affect ATP generation. (That’s the crucial leap-of-illogic.)
Therefore, the fact that this is minimized in 2 organisms, and maximized in 2 other organisms, may be because there is a general mechanism that has evolved that tries to set all properties of a protein at either a maximum or at a minimum, regardless of whether those properties are important.”

Also, keep in mind that the relatively “simple” minimal system created by JCVI is a 582970 base pair genome. (On a site note I was able to do some design detection in regards to this genome.)

Do you refer to your comments at http://www.uncommondescent.com.....challenge/

I personally know someone who won the grand prize in a contest – a trip for four to France! The odds were astronomical against her.

I don’t know what contest this was but let’s presume the odds were close to 1 in 10^8 (around the odds of Powerball). That’s a far cry from the Universal Probability Bound of 10^150 (or 500 informational bits).

But that’s only the Complexity, not the Specification, of CSI. Your friend would have to win a number of such contests in a row to qualify.

Keep in mind these are not the numbers for the entire evolutionary history of Earth. This is just for one information-based system!

We could start with just the Origin of Life:

“The first enzyme very possibly contained the sequence Asp-Ser-Gly, which is part of the active centers of phosphoglucomutase, trypsin, and chymotrypsin. Ribonuclease contains 124 amino acid residues. If all were equally common, this would mean 540 bits. The number is actually a little less than that. This number could be somewhat reduced if some amino acids were rare both in the medium and in the enzyme. I suggest that the primitive enzyme was a much shorter peptide of low activity and specificity, incorporating only 100 bits or so. But even this would mean one out of 1.3 x 10^30 possibilities. This is an unacceptable, large number. If a new organism were tried out every minute for 108 years, we should need 10^17 simultaneous trials to get the right result by chance. The earth’s surface is 5 x 10^18 cm2. There just isn’t, in my opinion, room. Sixty bits, or about 15 amino acids, would be more acceptable probabilistically, but less so biochemically. I suggest that the first synthetic organisms may have been something like a tobacco mosaic virus, but including the enzyme or enzymes needed for its own replication. More verifiably, I suggest that the first synthetic organisms may be so constituted. For natural, but not for laboratory life, a semipermeable membrane is needed. This could be constituted from an inactivated enzyme and lipids. I think, however, that the first synthetic organism may be much larger than the first which occurred. It may contain several different enzymes, with a specification of 5000 bits or so-about the information on a page of Chamber’s 7-figure logarithm tables. This should be quite within human possibilities. The question will then arise: How much smaller may the first natural organism have been? If this minimum involves 500 bits, one could conclude either that terrestrial life had had an extraterrestrial origin (with Nagy and Braun) or a supernatural one (with many religions, but by no means all).” (Haldane, Ibid., p.14).

Although Haldane’s comment is old, I find that interesting considering Koonin’s recent comments regard the unguided Origin Of Life (OOL) scenarios and as a conservative estimate he calculated 1 in 10^-1018 for the possibility that such a system could have arisen.

Also, keep in mind that the relatively “simple” minimal system created by JCVI is a 582970 base pair genome. (On a site note I was able to do some design detection in regards to this genome.) And even simpler viruses, which rely on hosts for survival, are composed of thousands of informational bits.

BTW, keep in mind that many ID proponents support Intelligent Evolution. That is, evolution did occur but intelligence was involved as well as none-foresighted mechanisms. There are multiple popular hypotheses as such. Some even believe that only intelligence was involved with the origin of LUCA and the system was “designed to evolve via non-foresighted mechanisms”.

Digdug:
I believe that evolutionary science is correct because, quite simply, everything else I’ve heard makes far less sense.

So you believe that we owe our existence to an accumulation of genetic mistakes?

Did you know that there isn’t any data which would demonstrate that the transformations required are even genetically obtainable?

IOW no one knows whether genetics can account for the diversity observed. The premise cannot even be objectively tested.

Did you also know we don’t even know what suite/ combination of genes are responsible for our vision system?

Digdug:
It seems to me that Intelligent Design can be summed up as such: “I can’t possibly believe that the complexity of life could have come about on its own, so therefore I’ll believe that it was designed by an even MORE complex being who came about on its own!”

It isn’t just complexity. We know complexity can arise without an inteligent designer.

And all someone has to do is to demonstrate that a living organism (specified complexity) can arise without any agency involvement and ID falls.

And no one says that the designer came into being all on its own.

We don’t know anything about the designer except what we can learn by studying the design.

The bottom-line is we exist and there is only ONE reality behind that existence.

And just what do you think are the alternatives to ID?

I know of two- Special Creation and sheer-dumb-luck.

Contrast that to Hebrews 3:4: ‘For every house is constructed by someone, but He that constructed all things is God.’

That’s a mighty big “if”. Or it could be that, like my car’s cruise control, it was intelligently designed.

And ID does NOT posit the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature./blockquote]

Amen, brother!

And ID does NOT posit the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.

IDists understand that complexity can arise without the aid of a designing agency.