Definition of "design"?

[sfs]

They can beg to differ all they want.

Martyrs do not kill themselves.

That is certainly not true in many non-Christian cultures, and it was not true in Christianity until roughly the time of Augustine. Eusebius, for example, includes among his lists of martyrs pious women who committed suicide to avoid rape.

 

[AV1611VET]

The suicide bombers and most of the Muslim world disagrees with you.

It is against the Koran to commit suicide, so they found a way around that by calling them "martyrs".

QV please: Islamic Suicide Bombers.

 

[DrkSdBls]

The suicide bombers and most of the Muslim world disagrees with you.

Still, Technically they aren't Martyrs.

Maybe in only in the Loosest of meaning. Talk about finding a Loop-hole.

 

[sfs]

Still, Technically they aren't Martyrs.

Where does one find this technical definition?

 

[laconicstudent]

I'm confused as to how the semantical debate on the definition of a martyr ties into the overall discussion of Evolutionary Theory.

 

[MoonLancer]

It is against the Koran to commit suicide, so they found a way around that by calling them "martyrs".

QV please: Islamic Suicide Bombers.

it also says that if you die while killing your enemy your are a hero and get lots of sexy virgins.

 

[DrkSdBls]

I'm confused as to how the semantical debate on the definition of a martyr ties into the overall discussion of Evolutionary Theory.

It doesn't. Then again, none of this for the last 17 pages do. It's just something to talk about by a bunch of people bored of the same conversions everyday.

 

[catzrfluffy]

A martyr is someone who chooses to die rather than to deny their faith.
Murdering lots of people isn't martyrdom, I wish people would stop this slanderous comparison.

 

[Thistlethorn]

A martyr is someone who chooses to die rather than to deny their faith.
Murdering lots of people isn't martyrdom, I wish people would stop this slanderous comparison.

It's not slanderous. A lot of people disagree with your definition of "martyr", that's all I'm saying.

 

[MrGoodBytes]

Martyrs don't kill themselves.

I never claimed otherwise. You asked how many of them died knowing that what they died for was a lie.

 

[laconicstudent]

A martyr is someone who chooses to die rather than to deny their faith.
Murdering lots of people isn't martyrdom, I wish people would stop this slanderous comparison.

How is it slanderous when multiple religious authorities, mainly conservative Muslim Imams, disagree with your interpretation?

 

[Jazmyn]

Traditionally, in Christianity, a martyr is someone who will die rather than deny the Lord. In Christianity, someone who kills many in an act of violence by committing suicide, is not considered a martyr. Suicide bombing is illegal, it causes grief for the many families whose loved ones were murdered, the victims did not consent. Comparing it to people who rather non-violently died for their faith is sort of equating them to something evil, thus I consider it slanderous.

 

[nvxplorer]

To all. If God did not play a part in natural processes, just keep going back and back - how do you explain how it happened? Bearing in mind this is just your "explanation".

Maybe it was God's powerful neighbor?

That we don't know the answer illustrates that by inserting the word "God," we are using this word as a metaphor for "that which we do not know."

 

[laconicstudent]

Traditionally, in Christianity, a martyr is someone who will die rather than deny the Lord. In Christianity, someone who kills many in an act of violence by committing suicide, is not considered a martyr. Suicide bombing is illegal, it causes grief for the many families whose loved ones were murdered, the victims did not consent. Comparing it to people who rather non-violently died for their faith is sort of equating them to something evil, thus I consider it slanderous.

I know. The point is there are other religions in this world that disagree. I'm hardly slandering anyone when I point out that Muslim Imams consider suicide bombers, and guerrilla fighters to be martyrs. That is a factual statement.

And if martyrdom is invalidated on the basis of legality, as you assert in your post, that means that all the early Christians weren't martyrs. After all, they broke the law by refusing to worship the deified Caesar. Therefore, they were criminals, not martyrs.

 

[Jazmyn]

I'm sure you have worked out, that I wasn't basing it solely on whether it was legal, more on the wrongness.

 

[laconicstudent]

I'm sure you have worked out, that I wasn't basing it solely on whether it was legal, more on the wrongness.

...Wrongness that can be relative across religions, which is the entire point.

 

[Mike Elphick]

After 170 odd posts, have we decided upon a defintion of 'design' yet?

I thought Alunyel was on the right lines:-

I'd define it as something that was consciously created in a specific way, to serve a specific purpose.

For example, a fork is created the way it is with a reason behind it. It's not a random shape, it's been created purposefully the way it is to fulfill a certain requirement.

Seconded by Thistlethorn:-

That would be my definition as well.

And hinted at by catzrfluffy:-

Writing a meaningful sentence or a functional computer program.
Loading a die to produce biased, often advantageous, outcomes.
The creation of a complex object such as a statue, or a stone arrow-head, or a computer, or a pocket knife.
If something has been designed by an intelligent unknown designer, we, as beings limited in knowledge, might not understand the way it is as it is, but it has been designed that way for a reason.

I agree, all man-made objects have a function, even if this is to amuse or decorate (arts and crafts) or change man's mental state (painting, music, drugs). A can-opener, for example, satisfies this criteria and we all know what its function is, but what is the 'function' of a rabbit, say? What is the 'purpose' of the universe? What 'function' does the Earth serve in the universe?

Paley's watch (ht*p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy) is a favourite example of the 'design implies a designer' argument used by creationists. But there's a number of very good arguments against this analogy:-

A characteristic of something designed by people is that it performs a function that doesn't help the object itself. The watch is not bothered what time it is, nor whether it is wound up or not, but these are important issues for the designer and the user of the watch. Darwin, I believe, stated that evolution couldn't produce a characteristic in one species that was beneficial only to another species.

In my opinion, evolution is a design process in its own right, but, compared with human 'intelligent' designs, it generates designs without foresight, intention or specific function.

Of course, internally, watches and bacteria both contain sub-units for which there's clearly a function (e.g. spring and flagellum), but it's the function of the complete object that distinguishes organisms generated by biological evolution and objects designed by humans.

 

[Mike Elphick]

The citation for the original article is:

Salisbury, Frank B, Natural Selection and the Complexity of the Gene, Nature 224, 342-343 (25 October 1969)

Thanks. I couldn't access the paper itself, but got some insight into what it's intention was:-

Salisbury put the question this way:

In reasonable time intervals, is mutation by random rearrangement of nucleotides [i.e., DNA bases] likely to produce an enzyme… Will there be an enzyme (gene) for selection to act on? [3]

Here’s the problem. Enzymes, like all proteins, are built within cells by linking amino acids together into long chains. There are 20 different amino acids, any one of which could potentially be placed at any position along the chain. But the actual chain sequences are anything but arbitrary. Rather, cells use elaborate machinery to link the amino acids according to the precise sequence specifications contained in genes. And because the protein chains are typically hundreds of amino acids long, the cellular machinery is hitting a very tight design specification every time a protein is made. So, even if we grant that some changes to these specifications are tolerable, the mere existence of a production line tuned to such precision implies that the precision is needed. If so, enzymes are much more complicated than they should be if they just happened. A short word might surface in your alphabet soup by chance, but a paragraph won’t.
ht*p://biologicinstitute.org/2008/04/03/perspectives/

First, he calculates that the odds against life beginning in the known expanse and age of the universe are 1 in 10^415, but, as he says himself, this is only true "if only one DNA molecule [1000 nucleotides large] were suitable" to get biology going. In other words, if many possible molecules could be substituted, these odds change for the better, as they also do if a smaller molecule could have gotten things started. Salisbury himself notes that the odds are rather good that at least one 141-nucleotide (or smaller) replicator could have formed, given the age and expanse of the universe as then understood. The discovery of the tetrahymena (see Addendum C) thus renders Salisbury's concerns moot: very small, simple replicators are now known to be possible.
ht*p://w*w.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html#Salisbury

So, it seems the 10^415 is for a single, specific DNA molecule that can self-replicate.

One of the great things about challenging creationists (who quote popular anti-evolution material that seems to self-replicate itself amongst the creationist community), lies on looking at the bad science behind it all and learning something.

Thanks to the internet, the reference Sophophile provided led me to a number of interesting papers. This one "How much of protein sequence space has been explored by life on Earth?" is quite relevant:-

Abstract
We suggest that the vastness of protein sequence space is actually completely explorable during the populating of the Earth by life by considering upper and lower limits for the number of organisms, genome size, mutation rate and the number of functionally distinct classes of amino acids. We conclude that rather than life having explored only an infinitesimally small part of sequence space in the last 4 Gyr, it is instead quite plausible for all of functional protein sequence space to have been explored and that furthermore, at the molecular level, there is no role for contingency.
ht*p://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/25/953.full.pdf+html

In the paper we read:-

...a reduced alphabet of amino acids is quite capable of producing all protein folds (approx. a few thousand discrete folds; Denton 2008) and providing a scaffold capable of supporting all protein functions (we will ignore the space of natively unfolded proteins for this current discussion but since such proteins usually fold upon performing their function, the distinction is not important for our purposes; Dyson & Wright 2005). The phase space of function may be some orders of magnitude greater than the size of the folding space as metagenomics projects are revealing increasing numbers of unknown protein families as adjudged by the number of novel protein sequences (Raes et al. 2007). However, it is not clear that new folds are present as a conserved fold, such as the TIM barrel, is capable of displaying many functions (Nagano et al. 2002).

To further support this idea of a reduced alphabet of amino acids, there are also very plausible suggestions that the original amino acid repertoire consisted of only four or five amino acids like those found in the Miller–Urey experiments and the Murchison meteorite (Miller et al. 1976), and that the genetic code was initially limited to these few amino acids that still predominate in proteins to the current day (e.g. Trifonov 2000; Brooks et al. 2002; Ikehara 2002). Proteins with reduced amino acid repertoires can fold and function successfully (e.g. Cordes et al. 1996; Riddle et al. 1997; Plaxco et al. 1998; Guo et al. 2004; Doi et al. 2005; Lo´pez de la Osa et al. 2007).

<...>

Finally, we conclude that the number 20^100 and similar large numbers (e.g. Salisbury 1969; Maynard Smith 1970; Mandecki 1998; Luisi 2003; Carrier 2004; de Duve 2005) are simply ‘straw men’ advanced to initiate discussion in the same spirit as the ‘Levinthal paradox’ of protein folding rates (Levinthal 1969; Zwanzig et al. 1992). 20^100 is now no more useful than the approximate 2x10^1 834097 books present in Borges’ (1999) fantastical ‘Library of Babel’ and has no connection with the real world of amino acids and proteins. Hence, we hope that our calculation will also rule out any possible use of this big numbers ‘game’ to provide justification for postulating divine intervention (Bradley 2004; Dembski 2004).

If you guys are going to keep moving the goalposts from the original link I posted, until evolution becomes a "must", then I'm out of this conversation.

Sorry, AV, but reducing the number of amino acids to half a dozen would indeed seem to change the gaol-posts! As I said, proteins don't necessarily need a specific sequence of amino acids.

 

[catzrfluffy]

A characteristic of something designed by people is that it performs a function that doesn't help the object itself. The watch is not bothered what time it is, nor whether it is wound up or not

That's because it's not alive.

but these are important issues for the designer and the user of the watch. Darwin, I believe, stated that evolution couldn't produce a characteristic in one species that was beneficial only to another species.

Humans can be do things beneficial only to other animals.

 

[gaara4158]

That's because it's not alive.Humans can be do things beneficial only to other animals.

Yes, but our ability to do such things comes from our intelligence, motor skills, social skills, etc. all of which are beneficial to us.