Stir your finger in a motionless pool of water with rocks in it.
You make ripples.
Things happen.
But move on to something else, and the ripples remain for awhile.
They move outward and form THEIR OWN SHAPES AND DIRECTIONS against the rocks even though you supplied the initial swirl.

Maybe someone is doing this with us.

Originally posted by brofjw
Stir your finger in a motionless pool of water with rocks in it.
You make ripples.
Things happen.
But move on to something else, and the ripples remain for awhile.
They move outward and form THEIR OWN SHAPES AND DIRECTIONS against the rocks even though you supplied the initial swirl.

Maybe someone is doing this with us.

you have pretty much summed up ID (but without claims that evolution is wrong). unfortunately for IDers, "maybe someone is doing that with us" is not science. theres no support for it.

I dont think people can tell the diff between science and religion. Science is a study and religion is a belief.

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Because in order for it to exist as any kind of philosophy, it has to begin with the premise that the earth and all people were created by an overachieving God in a week, while he was awol from the dutch army, lol.

I once fully believed that the theory of evolution could explain life. I ran into problems when I studied the organelle of protein synthesis, the ribosome.

A prokaryotic ribosome consists of two subunits.
“The 30S contains twenty-one proteins and a 16S RNA molecule. The 50S subunit contains about 34 proteins and two RNA molecules, a 23S species and a 5S species.” [1]

Here we have a tiny machine, 200 Angstroms in diameter, consisting of 58 independent parts that function cooperatively to synthesize proteins according to instructions contained in messenger RNA molecules captured by the ribosome.

It has been proven by experiments that the 58 components of the prokaryotic ribosome will self assemble into a functional unit if all the components are simply mixed together.

A problem for the evolution of the ribosome is that, at least for the 30S subunit, that:
“Most of the twenty-one proteins were needed (in addition to16S RNA) for the reassembly of a functionally active 30S particle” [2]
If the ribosome wasn’t ‘designed’ as a functional unit, then there should be a sequence of protein additions, each one adding enough efficiency for ‘natural selection’ to have codified it into the evolving organism.

This is not what experiments have found.

It is necessary for *all* the components to be present at once to form a functional ribosome.

What is the probability that the twenty-one proteins that form the 30S subunit would, by random mutations, occur together simultaneously?
You are kidding yourself if you think it is anything other than extremely remote.

Although the prokaryotes are the most diverse group of organisms in terms of metabolic pathways, they all employ the same system of protein synthesis, using the same twenty (out of 80+ possible) amino acids.
There are no intermediary forms among living organisms to illustrate how the universal acceptance of the current system was achieved.

As for synthesizing the ‘right’ proteins…
A protein of one hundred amino acids is a relatively small protein. How many different proteins of 100 life-using amino acids are there?
The answer is a mind boggling 20 to the100th power.
The number of different 100 AA proteins vastly exceeds the estimated number of particles in the known universe, or the number of seconds since the supposed origin of time (max 20 billion years).
How did life find the ‘right’ 55 proteins out of this enormous number of potential molecules all at once?

Incredulity is stretched to the max.

Additionally, there’s the chicken and egg problem that without the ribosome there would be no way to synthesize the proteins that are components of the ribosome.

If the Mars rover had sent back pictures of defunct machines littering Mars, no doubt some people would claim that as proof that intelligent life once existed on Mars. More ‘scientific’ thinkers though, would say that the machines had simply evolved there by themselves with absolutely no intelligent input.

[1] Stryer, Lubert. Biochemistry (1981) p. 653
[2] Stryer, Lubert. Biochemistry (1981) p. 654

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