If evolution were wrong, it means ...

[Mallon]

Isn't the growth of a zygote into a fully-formed baby proof that nature can produce "specified complexity" (whatever that means)?

 

[Smidlee]

Isn't the growth of a zygote into a fully-formed baby proof that nature can produce "specified complexity" (whatever that means)?

So now it depends on how you define nature. you could say we are a part of nature so anything man does is natural including filling up land fields with trash.

 

[Mallon]

So now it depends on how you define nature. you could say we are a part of nature so anything man does is natural including filling up land fields with trash.

But even animals grow from zygotes into adults. So again, I ask: doesn't this fact prove that nature can produce specified complexity?

 

[Smidlee]

No one disagree that life can reproduce life. I do see a single cell forming this body with a brain and now typing on this PC is nothing short of a miracle/ supernatural. If you told me this a hundred years ago I wouldn't have believe you.

 

[Mallon]

I do see a single cell forming this body with a brain and now typing on this PC is nothing short of a miracle/ supernatural.

What's supernatural about it? At which point in development is a miracle required?

 

[lucaspa]

Waaaaait a moment. This is probably a hole in my own knowledge, but I thought that prokaryotes did NOT have organelles while eukaryotes did, and that was the distinguishing feature. And since have A/ lacks A covers 100% of the possibilities, every cell would HAVE to be one or the other.

What do I have wrong? Please to explain.

Metherion

The "hole in your knowledge" is knowledge of the formation of cells from amino acids. They don't have DNA, therefore they don't have a nucleus. That is similar to prokaryotes. However, they do have intercellular compartmentation, which is similar to eukaryotes. So they are neither.

There is debate in science whether eukaryotes or prokaryotes were the first cells with DNA and directed protein synthesis. By "eukaryotes" they mean cells with nuclei and DNA with introns. Prokaryotes could be simplified eukaryotes.

However, the mitochondria and chloroplasts definitely came from some early eukaryote forming a symbiosis with a prokaryote.

 

[lucaspa]

No one disagree that life can reproduce life. I do see a single cell forming this body with a brain and now typing on this PC is nothing short of a miracle/ supernatural. If you told me this a hundred years ago I wouldn't have believe you.

So what? If I had told you 100 years ago about a PC, you would have considered that a miracle, but you don't consider anything about a PC "supernatural".

The point, Smidlee, is that going from a single cell fertilized ovum to you is going against "entropy". If creationists are correct about entropy, then that could not happen.

Mallon's question is very good. You might consider the process of embryonic development "miraculous", but please point to the individual miracles involved. Where exactly does a miracle occur in this process.

(I studied chick embryonic development. We watched those embryos literally 24/7. Never a sign of a miracle.)

Similarly, cleaning your room or the garage is going against entropy -- as creationists misuse entropy. Personally, I think some creationists came up with the "entropy" argument mostly so they could get out of cleaning the garage. When their wives said
"Honey, time to clean the garage."
"I can't dear. Don't you know that is impossible because you can't have anything go from disorder to order without a miracle? We'll just have to wait until God miraculously cleans the garage. Besides, there's a baseball game on TV."

 

[lucaspa]

So now it depends on how you define nature. you could say we are a part of nature so anything man does is natural including filling up land fields with trash.

What we mean by "nature" is that there are processes operating that do the job. What you are talking here is something manufactured by humans. Humans manufacture landfills. There is no process at the site of the landfill that would produce the contents of the landfill.

In embryonic development you would be saying that there is no process in the embryo or the physical environment that would turn a fertilized ovum into a complete multicellular organism. Somewhere in the process the next step has to be manufactured. IOW, there is a "gap" between the previous condition of the embryo and the next that cannot be filled by processes operating in "nature"; you need an outside manufacture to fill the gap.

So, in embryonic development, where exactly is that outside manufacture?

 

[lucaspa]

Next time type "Nature never produces anything with this degree of specified complexity own its own" so someone doesn't use the snowflake example. I knew exactly what you were referring to.

Even if you change the wording, we can still give you examples. Embryonic development is one. Here is another, written 25 year before Dembski coined the term "complex, specified information"

"In more recent work, Fox and his colleagues have shown that basic proteinoids, rich in lysine residues, selectively associate with the homopolynucleotides poly C and poly U but not with poly A or poly G. On the other hand, arginine-rich proteinoids associate selectively with poly A and poly G. In this manner, the information in proteinoids can be used to select polynucleotides. Morever, it is striking that aminoacyl adenylates yield oligopeptides when incubated with proteinoid-polynucleotide complexes, which thus have some of the characteristics of ribosomes. Fox has suggested that proteinoids bearing this sort of primitive chemical information could have transferred it to a primitive nucleic acid; the specificity of interaction between certain proteinoids and polynucleotides suggests the beginning of the genetic code." A. Lehninger, Biochemistry, 1975, pp 1047-1048

Everybody agrees proteins are complex. So we have complex, specified information arising from chemistry.