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. There is nothing but evidence that everything is always made of simpler things, until you come to the beginning where it's as simple as it can get.

That every thing is 100% faithful to every thing that lead up to it. If anything were going to be different a second time around, something has to change that lead up to it.

It just means that either no-one is thinking about ID in a serious fashion, so they never consider the complexity of the argument, or no-one is writing about ID in a serious fashion, so they are never explaining the complexity of the argument.

But if you look at the past, at all the tiny steps in evolution, at how the simplest of creatures gradually evolved slowly but surely over time, it does make sense.

Here is a quick media studies lesson: like it or not, journalists don't have to tell you the full scope of an article or documentary they are working on, and will sometimes try to keep the full picture from you if they think you might be hostile to the story you are trying to tell. It might be a little bit naughty, but it happens all the time, even here at El Reg. You're shocked, we know.

Misrepresentation is another thing entirely. But we suspect Dawkins and his mates are upset because their participation in the film makes them look a little foolish. Dawkins, of course, has made programmes himself in which his "opponents" don't come off looking quite so hot, so perhaps this is a object lesson in karma, eh? (Not that this would exist in a completely random Universe)

Posted by rockondon
As for the suggestion that Dawkins believes in ID - its almost shameless that people are foolish enough to believe such a thing. It'd be like me quote mining the pope to make him appear as an atheist, then deluding myself into believing it. If your belief system is so inherently false that you have to rely on such absurd fallacies to support it, you should change your belief system. I can't imagine a god that would expect his/her followers to lie about the world s/he created.

Not only does he admit to the possibility, but even goes on to suggest where we might find the evidence. I wonder if he is a "closet" creationist.

Another example. Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

Only if you, like Stein, engage in dishonest "quote mining" and take Dawkins out of context and of course ignore the entire corpus of the man's existing work and stated beliefs could you draw such an idiotic - hopelessly idiotic - conclusion. Also you would have to have ignored reading what the man himself said as was quoted in post 7 of this very thread...and I quote:

Now don't you have a bridge to go hide under to wait for some billygoats?

Billygoats would be a little more exciting then these strawmen you keep throwing around, so here's hoping.

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw man argument" is to describe a position that superficially resembles an opponent's actual view but is easier to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent (for example, deliberately overstating the opponent's position).[1] A straw man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it carries little or no real evidential weight, because the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted.[2]

Its name is derived from the practice of using straw men in combat training. In such training, a scarecrow is made in the image of the enemy with the single intent of attacking it. Such a target is, naturally, immobile and does not fight back, and is not as realistic to test skill against compared to a live and armed opponent. It is occasionally called a straw dog fallacy, scarecrow argument, or wooden dummy argument

Not only does he admit to the possibility,

Of course he admits to the possibility, he's a scientist. Scientists always admit to possibilities, even ones they think are unlikely. That kind of humility helps you find the truth. If his beliefs were sacrosanct, he wouldn't be a very good scientist.

Posted by themadfiddler
If you insist on using the termin0logy, please try to make an effort to understand what it means.

Perhaps your education was lax as regards the Brother's Grimm in my last reference as well...I'm sure many others here got it.

Posted by rockondon
Of course he admits to the possibility, he's a scientist. Scientists always admit to possibilities, even ones they think are unlikely. That kind of humility helps you find the truth. If his beliefs were sacrosanct, he wouldn't be a very good scientist.

There's plenty of creationis...err...IDers thinking about ID and writing about it in a serious fashion. They don't offer any evidence or any logical reason to believe it though. What they do offer a lot of rebuttals against other established theory - they seem to think that if they were able to disprove something else that it would somehow be considered evidence for their conjecture about ID.

When we look at how things developed on our world, we see how we started with things that are very simple have evolved to things that are very complex. If one desires, they can look at the incredibly sophisticated biological structures we have today, ignore the past, and convince themselves that such things are too complex to arrive in a fashion as described by evolutionary theory. But if you look at the past, at all the tiny steps in evolution, at how the simplest of creatures gradually evolved slowly but surely over time, it does make sense. It'd be like plucking a shipbuilder from the middle ages and showing him an apache helicopter - at first he might think that it would be impossible for humans to craft such a thing, but if you show him how we began with something simple and how our knowledge grew over time and how each thing we learned helped future generations learn from our victories and mistakes, then he could understand how we could build such things.

No matter how complicated something is, it took simple steps to get that way.

As for the suggestion that Dawkins believes in ID - its almost shameless that people are foolish enough to believe such a thing. It'd be like me quote mining the pope to make him appear as an atheist, then deluding myself into believing it.

If your belief system is so inherently false that you have to rely on such absurd fallacies to support it, you should change your belief system. I can't imagine a god that would expect his/her followers to lie about the world s/he created.

[posted by Kyro
Since you don't believe that there is an Intelligent Designer, then what is your solution for how life began on this planet?