JohnW
Posts: 3217
Joined: Aug. 2006
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| Quote (didymos @ May 13 2008,17:24) | ...which is just an excuse for me to mention this:
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When it comes to citing examples of purposeful design, nearly every author likes to point out the hen's egg. It's really quite remarkable. Despite having a shell that is a mere 0.35 mm think, they don't break when a parent sits on them. According to Dr. Knut Schmidt-Nielsen,
A bird egg is a mechanical structure strong enough to hold a chick securely during development, yet weak enough to break out of. The shell must let oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, yet be sufficiently impermeable to water to keep the contents from drying out.
Under microscopy, one can see the shell is a foamlike structure that resists cracking. Gases and water pass through 10,000 pores that average 17 micrometers in diameter. Ultimately, 6 liters of oxygen will have been taken in and 4.5 liters of carbon dioxide given off. The yolk is its food. All life support systems are self-contained, like a space shuttle.
All hen's eggs are ready to hatch on the twenty-first day. Every day is precisely preprogrammed. The heart starts beating on the sixth day. On the nineteenth day the embryo uses its egg tooth to puncture the air sac (beneath the flat end) and then takes two days to crack through the shell. |
That's it. That's the whole thing: Just look at it, man! It's like, totally designed, yah? I mean, dude. Duuuuude. DUDE. The chicken, it like: Sits. On. The. Egg. Sits on it! And it DOESN'T BREAK! What is up with that shit? I mean, C'MON! Dude, you know what sounds awesome right now? Scrambled Eggs. And Tabasco sauce. Can you drive? |
I saw that quote, and thought "Almost-perfect example of the standard-issue ID argument - lots of detail, but essentially just personal incredulity. But it's missing the usual tag-line of 'buy my book'."
So I went to the source. It begins with:
| Quote | | Note: This is one of a series of posts excerpted from my book, Billions of Missing Links: A Rational Look at the Mysteries Evolution Can't Explain. |
and ends with
| Quote | | Taken from: Billions of Missing Links (Harvest House Publishers, 2007) |
Evolution in action! We started with an existing pattern:
| Quote | Personal incredulity.
Buy my book. |
Now we've had a mutation, causing a duplication of some of the material:
| Quote | Buy my book.
Personal incredulity.
Buy my book. |
This mutation is neutral - it adds no information, while making the post no worse. (I read it with and without the first paragraph. It's bollocks either way.) But now, there's the possibility of a beneficial mutation, which adds information to the message (although it's highly likely to still be bollocks). I'll be on the lookout in future for something along the lines of
| Quote | God did it.
Personal incredulity.
Buy my book. |
or perhaps
| Quote | Buy my book.
Personal incredulity.
Scientists are Nazis. |
Exciting times indeed for ID!
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Math is just a language of reality. Its a waste of time to know it. - Robert Byers
There isn't any probability that the letter d is in the word "mathematics"... Â The correct answer would be "not even 0" - JoeG
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