Safe Speed Forums

Did anyone see Horizon yesterday evening?

It was about 'intelligent design' a US based 'anti-Darwin' movement.

What a load of tosh! Science is under threat from all sorts of forces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

I guess the more explicable the world becomes the less we depend on god for explanations, yet people who believe feel a certain threat from god's inevitable decline and ultimate redundancy.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Remember, science is only correct at the time of going to press

How many times have we been told that science has proved.....
Only a few year later to be overturned by another "theory"

There are some real BIG things that science cannot answer

Science has not told us where the universe came from (before the big bang), and probably never will. Science will probably never prove the origin of life. Now that is BIG stuff.

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Speed camera policy Kills

Hey Jethrow, I bet if we call it 'intelligent design' nobody will realise that it's just plain old 'creationism'.


but the point made is that saying "<insert your chosen deity here> did it" doesn't prove it either.

From theregister.co.uk

Shock BBC claim
By Lester Haines,
Published Thursday 26th January 2006 12:30 GMT


Updated A BBC survey into Brits' views on evolution has found that while 48 per cent of people opted for evolution as that which "best described their view of the origin and development of life", 22 per cent opted for creationism and 17 per cent for for intelligent design. The remainder of the pollees "did not know".

Asked which of the three theories should be included in school science lessons, 44 per cent said creationism should be on the agenda, 41 per cent voted for intelligent design, while 69 per cent backed evolution.

According to the Beeb - which conducted its probe of 2000 participants for a programme entitled: Horizon: A War on Science - this is evidence that "more than half the British population does not accept the theory of evolution".

I actually believe in intelligent design, but do not think it is the same as creation. I do not believe in god and Adam 'n' Eve etc.. but do think that somehow our DNA is pre-programmed rather then darwin's theory that the only reason why i am sitting here typing is because of a billion coincidences worked out it my favour.

Pre-programmed by what or whom exactly? This sounds like the beginnings of an 'argument from incredulity' and that is a well known logical fallacy.

I was watching a science programme about the genome last night. It mentioned how humans are 99% chimp and in fact we are also 50% banana. To me that suggests all life must have started with the same building blocks. You can even see the mutations and randomness occuring now in things like cancer. People thought mutations had to be only one or two to cause it but it seems it is more like 20 or more mutations. If 20 or more mutations are occuring just for one disease then the thouands needed over geological time must be possible.

Life has been evolving for billions of years which is a long time for mutations and developments to occur.

It does not need to




But natural selection and survival of the fittest should weed out mutations that can cause permture death and suseptability to disease very quickly. if Evolution can create so many complex things within our bodies, why are there so manyt things that still go wrong.

Why has evloution provided the human race with so many boilogical flaws.?

Can some one name just one species that has spontaniously appeared in the past 150 years or so since Darwin.

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Speed camera policy Kills

Well it is hardly a road safety matter, unless you get so upset about it as to have a road-rage attack and an accident, or didn’t notice the speed camera you just passed too fast.

If someone wants to ignore all the many years of effort and careful work of scientific research to find out where we came from, because of their dogma, then they are free to do so, but don’t let them foist "Intelligent Design" of creation on me, or on our children through our schools, as scientific fact.

If we think that our existence is so improbable through chance, then all I would say is that something else that was just as improbable would have existed instead.

With respect to dogma, one needs to look no further than the application of speed cameras, with the blind faith that they will improve road safety, when the scientific evidence shows that, at best, they provide no safety benefit, but just keep teams of people employed in operating the speed camera “partnerships”, while making life a misery for motorists.

What I would ask is, if God designed man then who designed God? since it would seem he would have to be such an exquisite being that he could not have come about by chance, according those who believe in Intelligent Design. Hence he must have been designed by a Super God, who in tern must have been designed by a Super Super God, and so on forever and ever and ever, Amen.

One thing that the evolutionists do not seem to have considered, however, is why religious belief in a God is so prevalent within the human species, since if it had no evolutionary benefit then we would have all surely evolved as atheists.

It is, however, an interesting speculation that as we get better at computer simulation, then it would seem conceivable that we could create intelligent beings who exist inside a powerful computer system, or network. If they become self aware they could wonder how they came into existence and if they evolved from some software swamp, or if they were created by a super being. It is even conceivable that what started out as someone's simple and self adapting computer virus may one day evolve into a community of such a self aware intelligent beings inside our computers. So would they have been created, or evolved. What if they then demanded that humans stop using their computer world. How do we know that we do not exist in someone's computer simulation program and if so I hope they don’t decide to go for a coffee and switch it off.

The

Here's a few with a paper discussing the definitions of species and speciation, to clarify the situation..

no, we should just believe it without any proof whatsoever. Good thing some of our ancestors had a little more capacity for thought.


You could also ask why there are so many flaws if the design is intelligent? Why did our designer give us an appendix? The answer to your question though can be due to many things. How about because we breed BEFORE a lot of these flaws kick in. We also care for our sick which means a lot of people who would die if they had to fend for themselves also get to breed.


what does the spontaneous appearance of new species have to do with EVOLUTION? On the other hand, there are millions of different species out there. Biologists are constantly discovering previously unknown species - including something big and furry on an island a few months ago.
How do we if they were around 150 years ago?


Here's my favourite 'intelligent' design page

Evolution can sometimes get it wrong. thousands of years can be 'spent ' by a species adapting to an environment, only for that environment to change rather more rapidly, say over 10s of years.

This happens for humans as much as any other species. the difference (or at least one of them) is we now have medicine to keep alive those with diseases and suscepibility to premature death, and sufficient civilisation to care for those who can't care for themselves.

Why shouldn't humans have so many flaws? in evolutionary terms we've only just arrived. Just because we're the most common species and have adapted the world to us does not mean that we are the 'best' race or the one most adapted to its environment. we (as a race) are very arrogant and think we are the most evolved, when a simple look around proves the lie of that and our science cannot yet tell us how evolved other species are.

Remember the old one. According to the laws of aerodynamics as we know them, bumble bees shouldn't be able to fly. yet they do. Therefore our laws are wrong, plain and simple.

our evolution MAY have been interfered with at some point in the very distant past - if it has it was so long ago that natural evolution has long since made its effects known, and we have absolutely no way of confirming this either way. I'm not prepared to take it on belief alone with no evidence, whereas we do have evidence of natural evolution a la Darwin. It's not perfect science by any means, but it is a good foundation.

Quite. The entire intelligent design argument hinges around the fact that life is supposedly too complex too have formed without a higher being's intervention (and let's be fair here, intelligent design is nothing more than creationism with some nice new clothes), yet if that were true, what exactly designed this higher being? Or are you saying that being just existed? In which case aren't you arguing for evolution?

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Carl Prescott

nah, those are the laws of fixed-wing aerodynamics. Bumble bees work like helicopters. No problem there.

Well Paul, you certainly opened a “can of worms” with this topic, which looks like it is going to take off much more and be much more interesting than any forum about speed cameras and road safety.

Perhaps you had better start a new website, called Safe Intelligence, unless someone can think of a better name.

I recall an incident when working as a research engineer at a research laboratory near Cambridge many years ago. Two of the scientists had to go by car to visit a client. One was a born again fundamentalist Christian and the other an atheist, or so the story goes. The fundamentalist was driving and as they travelled along they got into a discussion on such matters as religion, creation and evolution, which increasingly became acrimonious, with the result that the driving of the fundamentalist became more and more excessive and dangerous (obviously before the days of speed cameras). The atheist then remonstrated with the fundamentalist about his dangerous driving, who replied that if they got killed in an accident the he, the believer, would go to heaven, while the atheist would just cease to exist. For God’s sake slow down shouted the atheist. There your see, said the fundamentalist, you do believe after all.

An interesting epilogue to this is that the laboratory later became the principal research centre in England for unravelling the secret of life and existence, human DNA.

Yes, and it reminded me of an old joke. Heaven has no mass nor energy, and therefore cannot exist according to the laws of science. But the laws of science have no mass nor energy either, so they also can’t exist!

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I stole this .sig

It was equally clear from the show that people who believe in evolution (e.g. Dawkins) feel a certain threat from Darwinism's decline (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4648598.stm). One problem is that Darwinism is hard to understand, so people trade a familiar and reassuring mystery (God) against a more mysterious and brutal mystery (Darwinism).

Is there any rapprochement at all? What about defining God as an initial condition, which just serves to explain what we can never know for sure through science?

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I stole this .sig

Religion is a convenient answer for things you can't explain or understand

Q: why does the sun come up?
A: hmmm ummmm it must be the sun god!

look at little children, put them in a group and ask them to explain why something happens? in the absence of understanding and knowledge they'll create something from their own experience.

Q: why are there loads of people being killed on our roads?
A: must be because people are driving too fast?
Q: How do you work that out?
A:It must be, I believe it to be true.

The earth must be the centre of the universe because God wouldn't have made it any other way. Gallileo you can now go to jail. We'll talk to you again when you forget your stupid ideas.

In these enlightened days we just have different zealots telling us what to believe and how to behave, called the “Safety Camera Partnerships”. In their wisdom they absolutely know that if you drive 1mph over the allowed speed limit, no matter how arbitrary it may be or what the prevailing conditions are, then you are and bad and dangerous driver who will be condemned to a fine and penalty points. Do this four times and you will be excommunicated from driving.

Here endeth the first speeding lesson.