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13 Responses to ID Vindicated

1. 1

   JoeAugust 17, 2012 at 12:15 pm

   OK now if they mutate that “DNA book” they will be able to “write” every other book that ever existed and some that never existed!
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   JoeAugust 17, 2012 at 12:27 pm

   From the “Deniable Darwin”:

   On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote

   I IMAGINE THIS story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe.

   His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that “the Ulysses,” mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from “the Quixote.”

   I raise my eyebrows.

   Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer.

   “The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden,” he says. “They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo.”

   Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket.

   “As you know,” he continues, “the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576.”

   I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed.

   “Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor’s Los Hombres d’Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza’s remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined.”

   I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. “Is it your understanding, then,” I ask, “that every novel in the West was created in this way?”

   “Of course,” replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: “Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.”

   [Editor's Note: Various illuminating and thought-provoking responses to Dr. Berlinski's article, "The Deniable Darwin," were later submitted to Commentary Magazine. Many of these responses can be viewed offsite, here. Note the knee-jerk vitriol, personal attacks, and ridicule from many of the Darwinist responders, and the calm, collected response from Dr. Berlinski to his critics.]
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   Barry ArringtonAugust 17, 2012 at 2:53 pm

   Joe, if you’re a nut then we are on the same nut wavelength, because I thougth of that passage immediately as well.
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   butifnotAugust 17, 2012 at 4:36 pm

   Now thats funny, Joe
5. 5

   AxelAugust 17, 2012 at 6:55 pm

   It’s weird that, while their excogitations are derided by absolute dullards (I’m trying to speak temperately), none of the last, great, scientific paradigm-changers – of the early part of the last century! – were atheists, all were at least panentheists, none disbelieved in what Pauli called, ‘the central order of things’, what we call, ID; neither Pauli, himself, emphatically not Einstein, not Bohr, and emphatically not Godel, who was unambivalently Christian.

   To accept – without cognitive denial on some level – that mind is primary and matter secondary, is to identify ultimate truth as of an unambiguously personal nature, just as the cognition of the fabled observer of physicists’ lore is personal. We are united with the creator, ‘joined at the hip’. Or rather, ‘the head’.

   With Einstein’s relativity theories and quantum physics, they had already turned physics, the whole conception off science, upside down; scant wonder that they held back from the obvious revelation that their thoughts had uncovered.
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   JoeAugust 17, 2012 at 7:44 pm

   Barry-

   I’m a mixed nut transmitting without any SWR (standing wave ratio) broadcasting to DX land- next stop pirate radio-> oops sorry, flashback…
7. 7

   PaVAugust 18, 2012 at 2:47 pm

   I fully expected this post to generate more interest and enthusiasm.

   Why? Because this fundamentally undermines the common argument Darwinists use when pooh-poohing ID’s probabilistic arguments.

   Implies in their arguments is the idea that, though, the individual nucleotide bases might appear completely independent of one another, somehow, somewhere, there’s some (invisible) process at work which we just don’t anything about right now, a process that has a way of determining the sequencing of nucleotide bases in such a way as to obviate the need to consider a length of DNA as arising through random, independent events. This, of course, has the effect of undermining the probabilistic calculation used, which is exactly what they want to kid themselves into believing.

   But this technique demonstrates that a DNA molecule is, indeed, constructed in such a way that the sequencing is completely independent (else, information could not be stored). This dismantles their argument.

   However, we all know that Darwinists always have a “just-so” story ready at hand. I’m sure they will argue that this ‘independence’ can occur outside of a cell or cell nucleus, but that within the cell (or cell nucleus) are to be found certain factors that in some hidden (magical) way introduce the needed bias (hence, the information—just as the experimenters here introduced a ‘bias’; i.e., the information [words, figures] in the book using their experimental method).

   This, of course, is simply relying on unknown, hidden, magical powers. What is the difference between saying that an “intelligent being” placed the information found in the DNA using “unknown, hidden,” and ‘miraculous’ powers?

   So what this technique demonstrates is that, as Stephen Meyer in Signature in the Cell has already made clear, there is no bias natural to the nucleotide bases; hence, any bias introduced into DNA sequences HAS TO COME from OUTSIDE. An “outside” agency is needed.

   What, exactly, is this outside agency? Any right-thinking person, given the independence of the nucleotide bases and the probabilities associated with independent events, has to concede that the mechanisms attributed to NS operate so slowly as to only introduce a ‘bias’ to the DNA in the most limited of ways. Something is missing. And ID has the answer: intelligent design.
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   JoeAugust 18, 2012 at 3:01 pm

   I fully expected this post to generate more interest and enthusiasm.

   You must be forgetting that the bulk of the people who comment here already know ID has been vindicated many times over.

   We also already know that “the common argument Darwinists use when pooh-poohing ID’s probabilistic arguments” are total bunk.

   And hopefully most have read Meyer “Signature…”
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   PaVAugust 18, 2012 at 5:04 pm

   This is a real-life buttress to Meyer’s argument. DNA is being used as an information storage unit. This begs the question of where the genomic information present in all of life came from. And the Darwinists can no longer hide behind arguments suggesting that chemical properties have something to do with it.

   I hope everyone keeps this study in mind.
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    mphillipsAugust 18, 2012 at 5:44 pm

    PaV,

    And ID has the answer: intelligent design.

    But that’s not an answer is it?

    After all, what now?

    And what was the question that was asked where the result was “intelligent design”?

    It seems to me that an answer like “intelligent design” is no answer at all.

    I know that to you it seems like “evolution” or “darwinism” is the answer given when you are asking your questions, but typically the difference is those answers can be backed up. With actual research.

    If “intelligent design” is the answer, how can it be the same answer to all the different questions and what use is it in that case?

    What’s the origin of the symbol system? Intelligent Design.
    What’s the origin of bodyplans? Intelligent Design.
    What’s the origin of protein familys? Intelligent Design.

    This begs the question of where the genomic information present in all of life came from. And the Darwinists can no longer hide behind arguments suggesting that chemical properties have something to do with it.

    That’s like saying bits of wood and string have something to do with a Mozart recital.

    Nobody is claiming that the genomic information originated by anything as vague as “something to do with chemical properties”.

    And this latest news about storing information in DNA does nothing to show that “chemical properties” (i.e. the laws of physics) have been shown to place fundamental limits on the amount of organization that can develop naturally.
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    JoeAugust 18, 2012 at 6:13 pm

    But that’s not an answer is it?

    yes it is, when the question is designed or not?

    And what was the question that was asked where the result was “intelligent design”?

    What could have caused this to be the way it is?

    It seems to me that an answer like “intelligent design” is no answer at all.

    YOU are scientifically illiterate. Ya see determining something was the result of agency involvement changes the entire investigation. It is the difference between geology, the study of rocks, and archaeology, rocks as artifacts.

    Again Newton’s four rules of scientific reasoning are in effect. Do you not understand science?
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    MausAugust 18, 2012 at 9:40 pm

    PAV:
    

    This, of course, is simply relying on unknown, hidden, magical powers. What is the difference between saying that an “intelligent being” placed the information found in the DNA using “unknown, hidden,” and ‘miraculous’ powers?

    As neither have been empirically demonstrated then they are both no more than philosophical commitments. There’s nothing wrong with that as it is, but it’s a far different thing than knowledge — no matter how you wish to define knowledge.

    It’s been known that DNA is a storage device quite analogous to the tape of a finite Turing machine. And this work simply reiterates that in an intentionally designed and coded prospect. But I’m uncertain as to the rest of your argument. Is there any sort of common apologia given that DNA does not store information?

    So far as I’m aware the issue is only about the capacity of a non-linear system, with feedback, to produce what we see currently — ignoring initial issues of genesis.
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    EugenAugust 19, 2012 at 9:30 am

    Another interesting read in line with PaV’s original post. Dna is a versatile, stable , universal medium for storing and possibly exchanging information.

    http://blogs.scientificamerica...../dna-code/