All good science and mathematics looks for the limits of the abilities of processes. Are the laws of thermodynamics science-stoppers? Of course not. They simply point out areas where investigation will not likely produce good results. This has been a huge boon for science.

Likewise, pointing out that certain things in nature require information helps scientists look in appropriate rather than inappropriate directions for solutions. Rather than searching for non-teleological mechanism (like RMNS), perhaps they should be searching for teleological solutions, like non-random mutation. Behe’s goal is to take a step towards understanding where the line between teleological/non-teleological explanations lie, so we can evaluate whether a non-teleological explanation is likely the case.

What if you could say, for example, “on the basis of irreducible complexity, we can deduce that there is a higher-order mutational pattern occurring in the genome to generate this modification.” Then the search commences for what that higher-order pattern and mechanism is.

See ‘ Junk’ DNA makes compulsive reading

I just came back from Behe’s book signing. An offhand observation in his book, that it is possible for some random mutation to undo another random mutation, led me to think of this: reverse engineering of the original genome of, say, the E. Coli bacterium.

This project would aim to undo the effects of Darwinian evolution, and seek to restore the genome of whatever creature under consideration to its original state.

Clearly, this research program makes no sense from within the Darwinian paradigm, since, obviously, from the Darwinian paradigm, the original genome of any creature is no genome at all. A reduction to the absurd, to be sure.

Interesting questions, similar to the problem of restoring ancient texts (how to detect random insertions, deletions, single letter changes, &c.), would undoubtely crop up, but these promise to be interesting and fruitful issues of study.

Jerry, you correct that it is predicted via NDE/population genetics that, in the majority of cases, any *particular variant* would disappear given enough time if it is not positively selected for. However, new variants are always arising in the population through mutation. It is a birth-death process where, overall, the population maintains a certain level of variable loci and this level is proportional to its size, mutation rate, and demographic history.

I am not a scientist either but had a fair amount of science in college and grad school. The evidence points to lots of ways to add to the genome with meaningless junk but this is part of the natural process and in no way invalidates design.

Part of the design could have been the ability to adapt within certain limits and the various ways to modify the genome may have been part of this design. So in fact some of the “junk DNA” will end up as “junk” and be perfectly natural and result from how organisms have been designed. Genomes modify themselves quite frequently.

What ID is saying is that the creation of this junk has rarely if ever provided a new function of any meaningful difference to an organism. NDE is saying that it is doing this all the time but have yet to point to anything definite. They have lots of maybes, models, just so stories but no definites. Usually they point to hemoglobiin as an example of gene duplication at work.

Another thing that Darwinism does not predict but which is common, is wide variation on hundreds if not thousands of alleles within a species. NDE would predict most of these should disappear by NS or genetic drift over time but it does not seem to be the case. Some have described this as a major problem for NDE, namely the persistence of wide variations within a species. What is the origin of all the variations and why didn’t they get filtered out.

Also, I don’t believe every ID proponent believes in inreducible complexity. However, I think most ID proponents would state that a designer has a usage for a ll his design. This presupposition is far more beneficial to biology than either IC or junk. And, I think this is also one of the strongest arguments- a guidance seems quite evident in evolution- such as convergant evolution.

Try that with a document in a photocopier, and it’s inevitable that the nth generation of the copy is going to have some “junk,” while some of the original information might still make it through albeit distorted. Perhaps eventually it will become unrecognizable and take on some other form; mabye become some sort of Rorschach ink-blot looking thing within which you could–with some imagination–see pictures. But that doesn’t mean that the original document wasn’t designed or that it didn’t have useful information in it. Or that the Rorschach picture that it turned into was what was originally intended, or that it is in any way superior to the original (probably far, far worse than the original, for instance if it started out as a printed text of a Shakespare sonnet and ended up a blotchy picture that you could imagine looks something like a cow, it would have turned into something else indeed, but would not have gained any information that is of a more advanced nature than its original form).