Does that include people that already believe in a creator/"designer," who identify themselves as part of a religious movement? Better me than you I suppose, if it helps make the opposition appear intolerable. The origins of the ID movement may not matter to you, but it matters to people who believe that accepting one wishful hypothesis could contaminate the integrity of other fields.

Certainly, the world operates as if we are limited to three dimensions. If someone wants to go beyond hypothesizing more dimensions exist they are free to test their hypothesis and form a theory that does more than propose an idea. Until then I'd be more interested in elementary students picking up the basics, the known, the agreed upon, instead of "what if." ID doesn't go farther than agree on evolutionary gaps. It is in a nascent "I think" stage, not a theory, and its proponents have so much self-evident faith in it they don't have to prove themselves to the scientific community.



Don't just call us stubborn luddites, DR and Amlord. Prove that we are by extrapolating on Behe's "take my word for it" song and dance. Help yourself to a few pages of the cross examination, the opportunity to finally lay doubts on the validity of ID to rest creationists were waiting for. (BTW, ID doesn't, from what I read in the testimony, challenge the Big Bang theory supported by physicists [page 9]. Maybe physicists are working in tandem with evolutionary biologists to keep us ignorant of wonderful possibilities.)

I agree that ID failed the Lemon test, that's about it.



The popularity of this thread is a pretty good indication that this topic isn't going away. By the way, empirical science is a modern methodology and ancient scientists didn't use it, in fact, the ancient Greeks frowned upon it. Astonomy is the oldest science in the world and it does not use empirical science to observe how the universe works. Astronomy certainly does not need rationalism and the life sciences would be better off without it.



It was nessacary in order to protect religious liberty, nothing more. There are other cases going on and Intelligent Design will not become mainstream because it was mentioned in a public school textbook.



It's the ABCs of evolution, any thing but God can be taught. At least in science classes. Now in some other classes they still have Intelligent Design but those are electives, which is as it should be.



I don't recall the quote but I think the President simply suggested that evolution was just a theory. I think we should all consider the difference between a law in science and a theory. Mendelian genetics is law while Darwinism is pure suppostion.

Let's consider one aspect of evolutionary theory for now. Are you an ape, is your Mom, does having a common ancestor with apes make us apes? When considering the basic premise of evolution ( Darwinian single common ancestory) this would be the first place to look. It stands to reason that if we evolved from apes then there would be a genetic basis for this unprecedented transition, would it not.

Let us ponder the the most signifigant questions confronting the single common ancestor model in our day. What makes us human? (Nature 437, 69-87 ) What is the genetic basis for the threefold expansion of the human brain in 2 1/2 million years?(Genetics, Vol. 165, 2063-2070) What is the genetic and evolutionary background of phenotypic traits that set humans apart from our closest evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees?(Genome Research 14:1462-1473)

[note: the underlined words are links to the papers mentioned. Just point and click to see the sources)

One of the problems with the evolutionary expansion of the human brain from that of an ape is the size, weight and complexity. The human brian would have had to triple in size, starting 2 1/2 million years ago and ending 200 to 400 thousand years ago. The brain weight would have had to grow by 250% while the body only grows by 20%. The average brain weight would have to go from 400-450g, 2 1/2 MY ago to 1350–1450 g 0.2–0.4 MY.

"It is generally believed that the brain expansion set the stage for the emergence of human language and other high-order cognitive functions and that it was caused by adaptive selection (DECAN 1992 ), yet the genetic basis of the expansion remains elusive."

Evolution of the Human ASPM Gene, a Major Determinant of Brain Size, Genetics, Vol. 165, 2063-2070, December 2003

Jianzhi Zhang tried to determine if positive selection of amino acid substitutions that left the reading frame open are detectable in the ASPM gene. He instead found strong purifying selection and concluded that the postive selection of the ASPM gene took place time between 6–7 and 0.1 MY ago (0.5 x 10,000 generations x 20 years/generation). Researchers have determined that the gene is still evolving but I wonder how a congenital developmental defect characterized by severely reduced brain size could be an advantage.

For 150 years the consensus in the scientific community has been that human beings descended from some kind of an ape. The most likely candidate for our closest relative would be the chimpanzee since we have more in common with them then any of the other apes. In the September 2000 edition, Nature magazine printed an article that compared the entire genome of human beings to that of the chimpanzee and described the differences in great detail. What they found was approximately 35 million differences at a single-nucleotide level in addition to approximately 5 million indels (insertions/deletions). In order to understand the importance of these findings you have to consider what would have had to occur for human beings to share a common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Now in order for these 35 million differences to occur there would have had to be 3.5 mutations established genome wide per year for 10 million years.


35,000,000 differences in 10,000,000 years
3,500,000 differences in 1,000,000 years
350,000 differences in 100,000 years
35,000 differences in 10,000 years
3,500 differences in 1,000 years
350 differences in 100 years
35 differences in 10 years
3.5 differences per year

According to evolutionary theory we diverged from the chimpanzee about 10 million years ago (it was actually 5-7 million but I’m feeling generous). In that time there would have had to be 35 million differences accumulated genome wide. In the article they cite, ‘High genomic deleterious mutation rates in hominids’, published in Nature in 1999. In this article they proposed that there are 4.2 amino acid altering mutations per diploid per generation which they estimate to be about 20 years. They went on to say that 38% would be eliminated by natural selection leaving 1.6 new deleterious mutations. If you do the math then that is 8 mutations every 100 years and over a period of 10 million years it could only account for 800,000 differences.

8 every 100 years
80 every 1,000 years
800 every 10,000 years
8,000 every 100,000 years
80,000 every 1,000,000 years
800,000 in 10,000,000 years

Something is just not adding up here but wait it gets better. The most important of these changes would have had to occur in the last 2.5 million years. During that time the brain would have had to grow to 2.5 times the size of our supposed ancestors and also become 2.5 times denser. Even more recently the frontal lobes, believed to be essential for language, would have to have be developed.

We are all familiar with the famous double helix of Watson and Crick and since then the central dogma of biology has been DNA-Transcription-mRNA-Translation. You might remember from your basic biology class that when a cell replicates the first thing that happens is that a copy of the DNA is made by enzymes that unzips the double helix making two complimentary stands. This is the RNA that is transported to the ribosome where it is translated into proteins that become the building blocks of the cell. When you look at the double helix it resembles a spiral staircase and each of the steps would represent a single base pair. These nucleotides are grouped together in threes called codons that become the amino acids. The amino acids in turn become proteins and these proteins are built into cells, all of life works this way. When you change one or two of the nucleotides it will disrupt the reading frame, unless it’s in regions that are not involved in coding proteins.

Francis Crick and his colleagues determined that the DNA code was triplet by adding 1, 2, or 3 bases to the protein product. The result was that the protein coding sequence (a.k.a. reading frame) was disrupted. What makes this an important approach to the subject of genetics and evolutionary theory is that all species use the same messenger RNA (mRNA) codons to specify the same amino acids. A total of 4 different mRNA building blocks and 61 types of codons produce the 20 different amino acids that make up all biological proteins. When Crick and company substituted 1 base the reading frame was disrupted, when they substituted 2 it was disrupted. When they substituted three base pairs they could come up with a different amino acid so they demonstrated that the codons must come in threes, thus the term triplet codons. I cannot emphasis this strongly enough, all of life on this planet works this way.

The most common way a gene may mutate is when during replication (transcription/mitosis) they are misaligned. What are the chances of this happening spontaneously, you may be wondering? Each human gene, for example, has about a 1 in 100,000 chance of mutating spontaneously. The spontaneous mutation rate is so low in humans that researchers cannot provide efficient variants, so they use chemicals or radiation to cause mutations. In order for a rare change like this to contribute to the evolution of a species it must produce a beneficial effect on the offspring. This is not how the diversity we see all around us comes about, only certain genes can be altered without devastating consequences. Most of the differences are brought about by Operons in Bacteria and Transcription factors in multicellular organisms that turn genes on and off.

Back in May the International Chimpanzee Consortium did a similar study that compared the Human Chromosome 21 to the Chimpanzee Chromosome 22. What they found was that 83% of the amino acids show a difference on the nucleotide level. Remember what they discovered about the triplet codons, bear in mind that most of the differences between chimpanzees and humans are single base pairs. What is even more surprising is that 20% of the protein coding sequences are structurally different and only about 29% being identical. In order to put this in perspective you should realize that the human genome is about 3.3 billion nucleotides long with the average human genome only has about 130 mutations. Of these mutations about 80% of them do nothing at all with a much smaller percentage being deleterious, an even smaller percentage being lethal and a still smaller percentage being beneficial (its rare but yea it happens). The mutations that result in a benefit for the offspring are usually limited to a small minority and then only for a short time. The consequences of mutations on the level that would be required for human beings to have evolved from some kind of an ape would have resulted in terrible disease and disorders that would have made the mutated descendants extinct.

Intelligent Design is based on irreducable complexity and the human brain is irreducibly complex. Apes do not send humans to the moon but we sent one into orbit around the earth. At every turn in evolutionary theory we are confronted with impossible transtitions and it's time that scientists started taking this seriously. I didn't like the Panda's and People textbook because it failed to point out the importance of a genetic basis for evolution. This is the science and technology forum, what is natural science really learning about human evolution?