evolution vs intelligent design?

So, a lot of people that argue on the side of evolution and people that argue on the side of intelligent design tend to use one to exclude the other possibility. So I have to ask. Why does the existence of one mean that the other doesn't exist? You don't have to believe in God to believe in intelligent design. I was watching a documentary recently where it talked about how scientists were injecting the dna of extinct species into living species and coming up with a living species that had characteristics of the extinct species. I think that would be considered intelligent design in a way wouldn't it? So considering that's intelligent design, why couldn't a more advanced species than us from somewhere else that we have no proof of as of yet, be able to create a genome for a species that could over time evolve into other species? <macro-evolution> Micro-evolution is a lot easier to accept than macro-evolution, but that's another subject.

Going off the injecting dna into another animal. Scientists have been doing this with chickens.
When animals evolve they gain more chromosomes, chickens have 78 sets of chromosomes compared to our 23.

As species evolve they mutate, gain/lose features to survive. Scientists have been able to trigger the growth of teeth and long tail in chickens by reactivating chromosomes.

http://science.kqed.org/quest/2011/09/12/turning-chickens-into-dinosaurs/

To do all this you need to effectively map the creature you are looking into.
Imagine what humans could be hiding...
We already have white matter in our spinal cords, this is linked to chimps, it seems we evolved with dexterity while they kept brute strength. Its easy to see the white matter in effect, when people get shocked with enough electricity they will jump across the room, this is the white matter being triggered to get away as well as the muscles contracting. Maybe someday we'll get DNA modifiers so that we can unlock things that evolution lost.

Who created the dna that they are minipulating god or the scientists i think it would be a good thought to have and a better place to start after all the dna already existed before they modifyed it and your forgetting the fact that dna is mearly encoded data which can be minipulated and even altered to bring forth desired changes in gnomes.

How can u think that this is a form of intellegent design its mearly the alteration of already existing strans of dna.

Its not very intelligent when sometimes people can be born with tiny differences in genetics causing diseases like down syndrome. Its random and whenever a genetic change favors the species it is kept and passed on through the generations. Just like when humans left Africa thousands of years ago and got to Europe. The environment changed the color of their skin over generations. The humans that had white skin were able to absorb more vitamin D on cloudy days than their dark skinned counterparts.
If it was intelligence I'm sorry to say that its one cruel a*****e when it makes people come into the world with life altering deficiencies. Which is not the case. Its luck of the draw.

No divine power needed.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe drunken! thats why everything is like shit in this world! all evidence for evolution was planted by the Flying Spaghetti Monster to test our faith. Why does nobody see this?

The principle of evolution is beyond question. It's the exact mechanism and process that is in question. It may as well be impossible to fully understand it , especially with the evolution of the past.


Now it is not impossible that some intelligent aliens "designed" or "guided" some part of that process.


The proponents of intelligent design do not agree with either of the two points. They only believe in God. My question to them is , if we are so "well designed" , our "designer" , your god , is surely even more well designed , who designed the designer? You can take that to infinity. Somewhere ,sometime, a random event triggered these "structured" events.

Intelligent design refuses to believe that such an event could exist. Hence these two are not compatible.

You have many questions which I will address separately.

"Why does the existence of one mean that the other doesn't exist?"

It is not the terms, or definition of terms, that makes these things mutually exclusive.

The main concept of 'Intelligent Design' has a base in religious context. Without that origin, it's unlikely that as many people would support such an idea in the modern world. With that in mind, intelligent design is completely exclusive of a natural origin. I will address the idea of an "engineer" extra-terrestrial species a little further down.

Evolution theory is exclusionary of anything that is not naturally occurring with respect to changes on a micro-cellular DNA level. That is to say that evolution has stood the test of time, and come out nearly spotless. It has been refined as new information comes available, but it is very clearly the only explanation for observed speciation on this planet.

"So considering that's intelligent design, why couldn't a more advanced species than us from somewhere else that we have no proof of as of yet, be able to create a genome for a species that could over time evolve into other species?"

I'm going to preface this by simply stating that ignorance is not an insult. It is an observation of a lack of knowledge or a lack of reference to a subject. Now....

The universe is a VERY large place, and, at current technology levels, the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit. The Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years across. That means that while traveling at the speed of light, which we're not sure is possible for an object with mass, it would take you 100,000 years to cross the entire galaxy. The closest star to Sol, our star, is Proxima Centauri at about 4.22 light years. We happen to know that Proxima Centauri, and it's sister system Alpha Centauri, are not likely to be inhabited. Even if they are, it's not inhabited by an intelligence beyond our own. I say this with confidence because intelligence denotes technology, which would have left some kind of observable signal or artifact.

In the approximately 32,000 years that human beings have been living on this planet, we have yet to obtain the technology to send a person to another planet in the same solar system. Much less to travel interstellar distances. This planet has been in it's present state for some 4.5 billion years, which means that we could expect the same kind of protracted timeline for any other intelligent species. That alone severely reduces the time with which you can expect intelligence greater than our own to have time to develop. However the next bit is the real nail in the coffin.

Earth is comprised of many different heavy elements. Life itself is capable with some pretty basic elements, but technology at or greater than what we currently experience would definitely require heavy elements. These heavier elements didn't just exist at the beginning. Very specific supernovae are required to create these elements. Science predicts at least two generations of stars would be required before we could expect the earliest heavy elements to be present. This must occur before a rocky planet like our Earth can have any hope of forming.

Astronomers have discovered a star system, with five rocky planets, that could be as old as 11.2 billion years old. Given the 4.5 billion, give or take a few, years that it took for life to form into it's current state, we could speculate that complex life on these planets has had a 6.7 billion year head start on us. If they are immortal creatures, then they would conceivably have enough time to have made it here to Earth traveling at the speed of light.

TL;DR: It's highly illogical to suggest that a species beyond our intelligence has been here for any purpose, much less to seed life on this planet by design. The chances of this happening are so incredibly small that it is not a substantial factor for consideration.

I'd also like to add that even if life started in this manner it doesn't invalidate any of the processes in the theory of evolution. That only speaks to abiogenesis, which is a problem that science is still working on. Also "micro/macro" are not different forms of evolution. They are different stages within the same process. When you observe one level of this process you are observing evolution itself. You really shouldn't listen to a theologian when the topic is evolutionary science.

sub-forum = science

intelligent design is not science

I think life evolved here but if it didnt i dont think a sky pixie intelligently designed everything i think it would be aliens.
Evolution is far more likely though.

Interesting question. I'm tempted to say that the two things deal with slightly different portions of the history of life; namely, intelligent design deals with "how we got here" and has the side effect of saying that life was put here in the forms that it takes now, while evolution explains why life on this planet takes the forms that it does now but relies on other mechanisms to answer the question "how we got here." A more appropriate topic might be "Intelligent design vs. Abiogenesis."

However, out of the few responses, I'm surprised at how many "learned" individuals claim that intelligent design is a purely religious stance. It is not. Intelligent design simply claims that some designer is behind everything, but that designer need not be God. Richard Dawkins is not even opposed to an intelligent designer, as long as that designer is within this universe. To be sure, a certain subset of ID proponents, which are called creationists, are the religious group. But it's hardly fair to claim that the set of creationism proponents is exactly the same as the set of ID proponents, from basic set theory.

Now, I don't exactly have a well-defined, clear answer to the OP's question, but I would like to point out that many of the responses given make assumptions about what is absolutely possible given the state of *our* knowledge and technology and evolutionary history. But this precludes several obvious "what-ifs" that are perfectly valid to entertain (such as, what if evolution got really "lucky" somewhere else, speeding up the process, resulting in some other life in the universe has technology that is far beyond our own, and we just lack the means to recognize the footprints that were left behind?). This borders on an argument from probability, but I didn't say that the likelihood makes it true; I just said that it's possible and we should not discount the notion simply because of our local observations. It's just bad to say that the unlikelihood that we perceive makes it false, with no better evidence.

With regard to NitroDex's question about who created God, if he exists: if we make the assumptions that God does exist and that he is a perfect being, we must ask the question "Does a perfect being need to be created?" Or even "Can a perfect being be created?" I would argue that it is impossible to create something that is more perfect than yourself, because if you are imperfect, then imperfections will find their way into your design through you (no matter how many refinements you make to eliminate them, you will certainly introduce other imperfections through that process. See software design as a practical example), and certainly some of your own limitations will be inherently present (for example, I lack the power to create matter ex nihilo, so it is highly unlikely that I could design a machine to do just that). So, if we grant that argument, and if we allow our assumptions that God exists and is perfect, then he could not have been created except by another equally perfect being. Although I dislike Occam's razor with quite a passion, if we adhere to it then we should stop with the existence of one perfect being instead of opting for an infinite number of perfect beings who created each other sequentially.

Back to the actual topic. A (brief) sort of marriage between the two ideas that I've found to be somewhat common is that God created the universe in such a way that abiogenesis and evolution could work, culminating in where we are now. Not impossible, though you'd be hard pressed to find anyone on either side of the debate who truly embraces that idea. *shrugs*

Ultimately, the question of how we got here is, at present, impossible to concretely answer with our scientific method. We can just make educated guesses from what we see. Some people see information and conclude, based on what we know about information in general, that life was designed intelligently. Others see the progression of fossils and conclude that life spontaneously happened then evolution took care of the rest. To date, both conclusions are relatively reasonable, in a purely logical sense. We must accept that for the time being, also keeping in mind how seemingly concrete scientific theories can be turned on their head with new discoveries.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/why-is-the-scientific-world-abuzz-about-an-unpublished-paper-because-it-could-permanently-change-human-dna

First time DNA in a human embryo has been modified in a way that would carry into future generations. The evolution of man right here. [:grin:]

Man is God. Amen. XD