a Hunt for Designer Easter Eggs
While I suspect that the intelligent designer of our universe was careful to cover his tracks and make it appear as if natural phenomena could account for the existence of all things, I think it would be wise to initiate a hunt for evidence of the designer's "Easter Eggs." By Easter Eggs, I mean carefully-hidden indications of intelligence in situations that might otherwise be explained as natural phenomena. There are many places where a designer could hide such EEs. One place would be the fossil record. There among the bones of dinosaurs, pterydactyls, and trilobites, a designer could cleverly conceal a few tablets written in Linear A, or perhaps a DVD of the first season of The Sopranos. Such a discovery would quickly show Darwinists for the fools they are, and bring about a massive conversion to traditional Bible-based Christianity (even among obstinate Jews and terrorist Mohammadans). It strikes me as strange that no such geological Easter Eggs have yet been found, given the many blessings this would bring to our world. Perhaps the designer isn't interested in revealing himself to those who operate outside of faith.
Another place to look for Easter Eggs is among the codons of the DNA in our genome as well as the genomes of other (soulless) creatures. I can imagine a gene specifying a protein whose Amino Acids correspond to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. (It just so happens that there are code sequences for 24 amino acids - some of which are redundant - and there are 22 Hebrew characters.) Such a code would be easy to crack, since the most commonly-used Amino Acids in that protein would correspond to the most commonly-used characters in Hebrew. A clever designer could hide the entire Old Testament in, say, the genes for a lungfish (oh the irony!), and it would be easy for a cryptographer (or, really, any teenager with a claim to 1337 status) to puzzle it out. With this in mind, I think our government should be pumping billions of dollars into careful analysis of genomes in a hunt for messages from our designer. While we might not turn up anything in a year or even twenty, imagine what would happen if we found just even a limerick about Nantucket on, say, the human Y chromosome? It would be more profound than discovering signals from a distant intelligent civilization! (And we DO spend tax dollars on THAT search already.)
You should check out the Biologic company. They are an ID friendly research company that have got major breakthrough's on the horizon regarding empirical proof that DNA was designed, and that the designer had a specific plan. Sal Cordova has written extensively on this subject. If I had money to spare, I'd buy shares in Biologic!
That's really interesting. I have a seven figure trust fund I can't touch until I'm out of college but maybe I can convince my Dad to convince my trustees to invest my trust fund in that company. It would be totally awesome to get rich by getting in on the ground floor of this great new realm of scientific understanding!
I've no 7-digit fund, well next to that I'm ashamed to say how big (or small) it is. Lets just say I've learned to thank Jesus for all the good things other than money I have in my life. But that isn't to say that I don't want to use every God-given opportunity to make me and my family more wealthy.
I'm certain that any company that is actively applying the principles of ID is bound to make giant leaps ahead of it's anti-scientific competition. I would love to invest the little I have in a company that is pro-science. It's bound to yield immense dividends at a relatively low risk.
Can anybody provide details of Biologic and any other companies that are doing commercial research that uses ID?
Bob
Here is a little on Biologic:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/12/intelligent_design_research_la.html
Cheers!
I'd like to know some specifics on why an understanding of DNA being designed would be anymore important than if it developed over time through evolution. An understanding of the workings of DNA would be the same either way wouldn't it? I mean how it works is the important part of the equation not how it got here.
Nobody in this forum pretends to know much one way or the other about how DNA works or what it actually does. I'm sure it has something to do with cells and reproduction and stuff. You know, double helix, it splits, some enzymes attaches new nucleotides to it, and so it duplicates. Or a ribosome rides along it, spitting out one protein after another that go off to do cool stuff in the cell. All this stuff is pretty well known at this point. The reason we're here on this site, though, is to talk about how all these things are really little robots that some designer designed, sort of like Santa working in his shop, but maybe far away, outside the realm of space and time. We like to say that because some of these little things in our cells wouldn't work if you were to take away just one of their parts (that is, they're IRREDUCIBLY COMPLEX), then they must not have evolved via evolution but must have instead been made by some dude. I know this then begs the question of who made the dude who went and made the whatever. But perhaps THAT entity, the designer's designer, was NOT irreducibly complex; he might have emerged from a world without flagella and blood clotting (the two most familiar biological objects advanced as irreducibly complex).
Hello wvit1001,
Thank you for your post.
wvit1001 in bold:
I'd like to know some specifics on why an understanding of DNA being designed would be anymore important than if it developed over time through evolution. An understanding of the workings of DNA would be the same either way wouldn't it? I mean how it works is the important part of the equation not how it got here.
The importance of design over RM+NS is that, from a design perspective, DNA components would be studied rigorously before making the assumption that most of it is simply junk. The idea of looking at things as though they were designed is not a new one. Almost every great scientist began with the assumption of "design." There is great explicatory power by looking at nature in such a way. On the other hand, trying to construct an outboard motor (such as the bacterial flagellum) through a blind process seems absurd. Why is that? Well, because outboard motors do not function by piecemeal, but until all modules are in order. This is something that goes comletely against the evolutionary process.
So, "how it got there" seems far more relevant, especially when patterns lead to spur further scientific discovery.
Here are a couple of articles for you to read (in PDF). I hope you like them:
Cordially,
ML
I think a DVD of the Sopranos could also be considered evidence of time travel unless you're sure that the almighty is a fan!
If God wanted to leave a geological Easter Egg then s/he would put it where it was sure to be found otherwise there wouldn't be much point.
ellazimm wrote:
"If God wanted to leave a geological Easter Egg then s/he would put it where it was sure to be found otherwise there wouldn't be much point."
Hmmm…I can't help but wonder why any mere human would think even for one second that they knew better what God would or should do in a particular circumstance and what God's reasons would or would not be.
And it's interesting to me that typically it's the atheists who are most willing to be this presumptuous.
TRoutMac
Intelligent (Graphic) Designer
Hmmm…I can't help but wonder why any mere human would think even for one second that they knew better what God would or should do in a particular circumstance and what God's reasons would or would not be.
And it's interesting to me that typically it's the atheists who are most willing to be this presumptuous.
Atheists or people that put "Rev." in front of their name. ;)
Fairly recently, so-called junk DNA has been found to have a purpose. While it does not directly code for a protein, it does provide control information for the manufacture of proteins. The process is rather complex and trying to diagram these feedback loops and control signals creates something that is very similar to electronics or flow process schematics. It is actually one more thing that evolution cannot account for. They fully expected "junk" DNA to be...leftover junk! Of course, now that the truth has been revealed, they've changed their tune a bit.
These processes, control signals and feedback loops responsible for the manufacture of even a single protein are obvious signs of design.
Ken Pritchett
Physicist-Creationist
Birmingham, AL
www.evolutionistsnightmare.com
…what about polymorphism? As a student with a huge background in human genomics (and even a little proteomics), I can tell that it won't be easy to agree on a "consensus" sequence, konwing the variability of some sequences in our genomes.
Can't we try searching first in highly conserved sequences (as a matter of fact, they are the one displaying the highest degree of conservation among species, id est the best place ever to encode a message)
Hey, who knows, maybe you can ask Craig Venter's help on this on, he might have some material to give up!
We have to remember that God is a scientist, an artists, and a dad. If He'd put out Easter eggs for us to find, He'd do it on all three levels. So we would have to invest in science, aesthetics, and in our childlike wonder to discover the eggs He hid for us. Take DNA for example - He'd not only put some kind of scientific clue in there, but He'd also do something aesthetically pleasing, something to entice us and make us enjoy the hunt. I personally feel that the Golden Mean is probably a major Easter egg. Does anybody else see anything that might fit the bill?
"Doctors can't be everywhere. That's why the Good Lord invented Vulcans." -- Leonard "Bones" McCoy, STAR TREK TOS
Easter is a vast piece of poetry to me. New clothes. Mass at night. Stories of the transition from death to life. Family gatherings. Goodies aplenty. When I was little, and growing up in Bandra, Easter eggs representing the beginning of new life, lay hidden around the house. Each beautifully-crafted egg made of marzipan or chocolate sat somewhere, tucked away and elusive, secret and palpable, waiting to be discovered by a hungry bunch of children who couldn’t wait to tear off the colourful wrappers and ribbons to get at the rush of sweetness that lay beneath.
My grandmother, a flamboyant woman who fashioned these eggs, took great pleasure in dressing me in frills and lace for midnight mass. I enjoyed the mass on open grounds rather than in the closed church. So I tolerated the elaborate dressing rituals.
While she tied a white bow in my hair, and gave me a candle to hold during the Easter Vigil service, she threw in a story about the ‘good old days.’ “I remember in the early 60’s, women wore veils, people were more devout. There was less distraction. The language used was Latin not English. We followed the translation from our prayer books,” she used to recall.
Today she no longer dresses me, but still tells me stories. As we make our way towards St Andrew’s grounds, she screams above the traffic, “In those days, making Easter eggs was a family affair. The fingernails of the community smelled of marzipan for a week. Now you children run off to work and we have no help. So people buy them from bakeries. Arre baba, yesterday only dat Bonzo was telling me how costly these Easter Eggs are. 75 rupees for a chottu egg. What nonsense men.”
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Submited by : Dietas
Radical ID
What a great and radical idea. If DNA were designed then we would expect to see artefacts or consequences of this design work.
For example, "junk DNA" might be a clue about how the design process worked. For example, when designing an organism he might have over-estimated the amount of genetic material required. These non-coding regions merely represent unused portions of a blank canvas.
I read in a science journal that researchers have been able to store digital information inside bacterial DNA. I'm certain that the creator would have been aware of this. It's entirely rational to imagine what other uses the creator might have had for this versatile chemical.
Helena