In response to comment by MrHen on An Alien God
Comment author: moedavid 14 March 2010 03:13:51PM -15 points [-]

In his rant against intelligent design theory , Yudkowsky seems to have overlooked a simple fact. Darwinian Evolution is irrelevant to the whole discussion. Darwinian Evolution is only operative and relevant from the moment you have a DNA based organism capable of self replication. (I know that there are highly speculative theories of earlier "simpler" self replicating molecules. There is no evidence at all that they ever actually existed, and no one has ever seen one outside of a laboratory where even the highly limited ability to self replicate is a product of the intelligent design of the chemists and microbiologists involved)

Since absolutely no one has ever come up with anything even approaching a plausible naturalistic explanation of the origin of life from non-life, the obvious truth is that the first DNA based bacterium (the simplest life form we know of) with it's staggeringly functionally complex digital code was created by a supernatural intelligence.

Again, all forms of life are possible (I.e. Darwinian Evolution and Natural Selection are possible) if, and only if, the proper molecular machinery is in place. The irony is that not only is Darwinian Evolution not an explanation nor the cause of the fantastic and astounding functional complexity of life on this planet, Darwinian Evolution is a process that is the result of the astounding functional complexity of life on this planet.

In response to comment by moedavid on An Alien God
Comment author: deekoo 05 July 2010 09:56:47PM 5 points [-]

moedavid, Darwininan evolution is relevant from the moment you have anything that replicates itself - any of the hypothesized simpler replicators would have been subject to the same process of selection-by-survival that drives the evolution of modern life forms.

It's a mistake to look at modern bacteria as if they were the first life on Earth. A modern bacterium is the product of billions of years of evolutionary refinement, and the short lifespans of many bacteria mean that they can cram more evolutionary iterations into that time than more long-lived organisms can. They may well be genetically further away from the First Cell than we are.

Also, there is a big leap from 'we haven't been able to determine the exact naturalistic mechanism by which DNA life evolved' to 'therefore it was created by intelligence', and another big leap from 'it was created by intelligence' to 'it was created by supernatural intelligence'.