@DivinelyDesined Category error, Life is not engineered.
The first premise is simply asserted, not demonstrated. "Only intelligence can engineer complex, interdependent systems" — this is the very thing they need to prove, not assume. We have well-documented natural processes that generate
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@DivinelyDesined complex, interdependent systems without any guiding intelligence: snowflake crystallography, self-organizing chemical oscillations (Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions), termite mounds, and of course biological evolution via natural selection.
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@DivinelyDesined "Interdependent" ≠ "designed as a unit." This is just irreducible complexity repackaged. Interdependent systems evolve through scaffolding — components that were once independently functional or served different roles become co-dependent as redundant pathways are lost.
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@DivinelyDesined The bacterial flagellum's components, for instance, share homology with the Type III secretion system, showing they were co-opted, not designed from scratch as a unit.
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@DivinelyDesined It smuggles in the conclusion through word choice. Using "engineering" to describe biological systems already presupposes a designer. Natural selection is a non-intelligent process that mimics engineering outcomes through iterative variation and differential
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@DivinelyDesined reproduction over deep time. Calling the result "engineered" is begging the question.
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@DivinelyDesined The "no exception" claim is unfalsifiable as stated. Whenever a natural explanation is provided, ID proponents simply move the goalposts or redefine "complex" and "interdependent" to exclude the example. That's not logic — it's an immunizing strategy.
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@DivinelyDesined The actual most logical conclusion from what we observe is the one with the most supporting evidence: natural selection acting on heritable variation, supplemented by genetic drift, gene duplication, and co-option, is entirely sufficient to produce biological complexity.
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@DivinelyDesined This is one of the most persistent misunderstandings in the ID community, and it gets the history, the science, and the predictions exactly backwards.
It's almost like creationists are morons.
Let's unwrap the bullshit:
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@DivinelyDesined "Junk DNA" was never a core evolutionary prediction. The term was coined by Susumu Ohno in 1972 and was always informal. Evolutionary theory actually predicts that some non-coding DNA will acquire function over time — that's literally how new regulatory elements,
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@DivinelyDesined promoters, and genes evolve. Gene duplication, exaptation of transposable elements, co-option of non-coding sequences as enhancers — these are all evolutionary mechanisms that convert non-functional DNA into functional DNA.
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@DivinelyDesined Point 7: It's funny how science is always on the side of evolution while creationists are WRONG and lie all the time.
"If a gene was duplicated randomly, without a purpose, it has much more potential to cause harm than to do nothing" — this is empirically false.
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@DivinelyDesined Lynch & Conery (2000, Science) analysed complete genome data across multiple eukaryotic species and found gene duplication occurs at a rate of roughly 0.01 per gene per million years. Most duplicates are indeed lost — but a significant fraction (~15-30%) are retained,
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@DivinelyDesined either through subfunctionalisation or neofunctionalisation. If duplicates were as harmful as you claim, genomes wouldn't be full of them. But they are. The human genome contains over 5,000 duplicate gene families.
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@DivinelyDesined What a load of ignorant fucking nonsense. you got all of this from the "Discovery Institute", and it is lies and deception designed to make sure religious dumb-dumbs don't question the bible.
Let's dissect the stupid nonsense:
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@DivinelyDesined Gauger and Axe are not neutral researchers. Both are affiliated with the Biologic Institute, which was funded by the Discovery Institute — the primary institutional advocate for intelligent design. Axe's career has been largely dedicated to arguing proteins can't evolve.
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@DivinelyDesined This doesn't automatically invalidate their work, but it's important context when your post presents them as though they're reporting mainstream findings.
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@DivinelyDesined Let's dissect your nonsense and once again clear the muddy waters you stir up.
One at a a time:
"Novel complex systems have never been observed arising" — this depends entirely on how you define "novel," which you'll conveniently shift every time an example is presented.
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@DivinelyDesined But here are some that are hard to dismiss:
The de novo evolution of a multi-protein citrate metabolism system in Lenski's Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEP). E. coli cannot metabolise citrate aerobically — that's so fundamental it's literally used as a diagnostic
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@DivinelyDesined criterion for the species. After ~31,000 generations, one lineage evolved the ability through a series of mutations including a gene duplication that placed a transporter gene under a new promoter.
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@DivinelyDesined This is the argument from analogy, and it fails for a well-known reason: biology is precisely the domain where we do have a demonstrated alternative mechanism. That's what makes it the exception.
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@DivinelyDesined In "all human experience," we also never see complex organisms arise from an intelligence sitting down and assembling them molecule by molecule. What we do observe, in real time, is selection acting on variation — antibiotic resistance evolving in bacteria,
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@DivinelyDesined nylonase enzymes appearing to digest synthetic materials that didn't exist before 1935, new species of mosquitoes emerging in the London Underground, ring species completing speciation gradients across continents.
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@DivinelyDesined @TherionWare @TherionWare Therion Ware's critique was solid.
The response from Divinely Dumb makes several fundamental errors:
A. "Parallel mutations don't help because of reproductive limits"
This completely misses the point about neutral theory.
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@DivinelyDesined @TherionWare Neutral mutations don't need to "spread" through reproductive advantage — they drift stochastically. The rate of neutral substitution equals the per-individual mutation rate (Kimura 1968), independent of population size or reproductive limits.
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@DivinelyDesined @TherionWare With ~60 mutations per person per generation, neutral differences accumulate automatically over millions of years. No "spreading" bottleneck exists because there's no selection driving it.
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