At UD, Vincent Torley links to an odd little paper by William Lycan, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina, entitled Giving Dualism Its Due.
The abstract reads:
Despite the current resurgence of modest forms of mind-body dualism, traditional Cartesian immaterial-substance dualism has few if any defenders. This paper argues that no convincing case has been against substance dualism, and that standard objections to it can be credibly answered.
Simplistic combinatorial analyses are an honoured tradition in anti-evolutionary circles. Hoyle’s is the archetype of the combinatorial approach, and he gets a whole fallacy named after him for his trouble. The approach will be familiar – a string of length n composed of v different kinds of subunit is one point in a permutation space containing vn points in total. The chance of hitting any given sequence in one step, such as the one you have selected as ‘target’, is the reciprocal of that number. Exponentiation being the powerful tool it is, it takes only a little work with a calculator to assess the permutations available to the biological polymers DNA and protein and come up with some implausibly large numbers and conclude that Life – and, if you are feeling bold, evolution – is impossible.
Dryden, Thomson and White of Edinburgh University’s Chemistry department argue in this 2008 paper that not only is the combinatorial space of the canonical 20 L-acids much smaller than simplistically assumed, but more surprisingly, that it is sufficiently small to have been explored completely during the history of life on earth. Continue reading
[23rd May, 2013 As Kairosfocus continues to reiterate his objections to the views I express in this post, I am taking the opportunity today to clarify my own position:
I will move this post to the sandbox shortly, but as I am banned from UD, and therefore cannot respond to this in the place where it was issued, I am doing so here. Kairosfocus writes:
Aplologies straight away for clogging up such an excellent site with this old chestnut but in the light of GEM (Kairosfocus) having apparently directing a long OP at me over some exchanges in an earlier thread, and as Kairosfocus has closed comments I feel I ought to take an opportunity to respond here. I’ll put everything else below the fold.
I here present a number of theses, each of which deserves an independent argument in support of it, but which I think are both true and defensible:
(1) The resistance to Darwinism as expressed by creationism and by intelligent design largely arises from treating “Darwinism” as a scapegoat for the social ills produced by capitalism. It has become commonplace among creationist and other anti-Darwinists to blame Darwinism for any and all of the following: eugenics, acceptance of homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, genocide, school shootings, abortion, and decline of ecclesiastical authority.
(2) Though the obsession with sexuality and anxiety about the ambiguity of embodiment are standard-fare among the religious far-right, my interest here lies in what it is about contemporary presentations of Darwinism that make it such a tempting target for these anxieties.
When I started this site, I had been struck by the remarkable symmetry between the objections raised by ID proponents to evolution, and the objections raised by ID opponents to ID – both “sides” seemed to think that the other side was motivated by fear of breaking ranks; fear of institutional expulsion; fear of facing up to the consequences of finding themselves mistaken; not understanding the other’s position adequately; blinkered by what they want, ideologically, to be true, etc. Insulting characterisations are hurled freely in both directions. Those symmetries remain, as does the purpose of this site, which is to try to drill past those symmetrical prejudices to reach the mother-lode of genuine difference.
But two asymmetries now stand out to me:
At Evolution News and Views, David Klinghoffer presents a challenge:
Man needs meaning. We crave it, especially when faced with adversity. I challenge any Darwinist readers to write some comments down that would be suitable, not laughable, in the context of speaking to people who have lived through an event like Monday’s bombing. By all means, let me know what you come up with.
Leaving aside Klinghoffer’s conflation of “Darwinism” with atheism, and reading it as a challenge for those of us who do not believe in a supernatural deity or an afterlife (which would include me), and despite lacking the eloquence of the speakers Klinghoffer refers to, let me offer some thoughts, not on Monday’s bombing, specifically, but on violent death in general, which probably touches us all, at some time. Too many lives end far too soon:
We have one life, and it is precious, and the lives of those we love are more precious to us than our own. Even timely death leaves a void in the lives of those left, but the gap left by violent death is ragged, the raw end of hopes and plans and dreams and possibilities. Death is the end of options, and violent death is the smashing of those options; Death itself has no meaning. But our lives and actions have meaning. We mean things, we do things, we act with intention, and our acts ripple onwards, changing the courses of other lives, as our lives are changed in return. And more powerful than the ripples of evil acts are acts of love, kindness, generosity, and imagination. Like the butterfly in Peking that can cause a hurricane in New York, a child’s smile can outlive us all. Good acts are not undone by death, even violent death. We have one life, and it is precious, and no act of violence can destroy its worth.
The Mice once called a meeting to decide on a plan to free themselves of their enemy, the Cat. At least they wished to find some way of knowing when she was coming, so they might have time to run away. Indeed, something had to be done, for they lived in such constant fear of her claws that they hardly dared stir from their dens by night or day. Many plans were discussed, but none of them was thought good enough. At last a very young Mouse got up and said: “I have a plan that seems very simple, but I know it will be successful. All we have to do is to hang a bell about the Cat’s neck. When we hear the bell ringing we will know immediately that our enemy is coming.” All the Mice were much surprised that they had not thought of such a plan before. But in the midst of the rejoicing over their good fortune, an old Mouse arose and said: “I will say that the plan of the young Mouse is very good. But let me ask one question: Who will bell the Cat?”
More heat than light seems to me to be generated by the demand for IDists to “define CSI” and the equations that are fired back in response. Nobody is disputing that we have plenty of equations. Here is that bright young mouse, Dembski’s:
χ= –log2[10120 · φS(T)·P(T|H)]
The problem seems to me to lie in Belling the Cat.
Andre poses some interesting questions to Nick Matzke. I thought I’d start a thread that might help him find some answers. I’ll have first go :
Hi Nick
Yes please can we get a textbook on Macro-evolution’s facts!
I’ll make it easy for you;
1.) I want to see a step by step process of the evolution of the lung system.
Google Scholar: evolution of the lung sarcopterygian
Right now, for some bizarre reason (I have no idea how the topic relates to Intelligent Design), Uncommon Descent (“serving the Intelligent Design Community”) has an OP by Barry Arrington presented “without comment”, and consisting entirely of an image of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, next to a sickening piece of racist text, which is attributed to her.
It turns out (h/t to various members here) that this quotation is widely attributed to Margaret Sanger on the web, usually to the Birth Control Review, April 1933, No such words are found in that journal – indeed, no article by Margaret Sanger appears in that journal that I can find. Another reference gives it as Birth Control Review, October 1926. Well, I can’t find it there either.
In other words, this calumny has been passed around the web, with faux “authoritative” citations, with nobody bothering to check the primary source, which is, in fact, easy to check.
Some folk might be having problems trying to login to the site. I don’t know much about this, but here’s what I do know:
In case you are wondering how I managed to post this – I was actually logged in with two different browsers. My login with “firefox” (my preferred browser) has expired. My login with “rekonq” has not yet expired. I think it has another week to go. So I am posting this from “rekonq”.
DennisJones at UncommonDescent has published an argument that Behe’s irreducible complexity has resisted all attempts at refutation.
…The only logic fallacy would be to draw a conclusion while resisting further examination. Such is not the case with irreducible complexity. The hypothesis has endured 17 years of laboratory research by molecular biologists, and the research continues to this very day.
An irreducibly complex system is one that
(a) the removal of a protein renders the molecular machine inoperable, and
(b) the biochemical structure has no stepwise evolutionary pathway.Here’s how one would set up examination by using gene knockout, reverse engineering, study of homology, and genome sequencing:
I. To CONFIRM Irreducible Complexity:
Show:
1. The molecular machine fails to operate upon the removal of a protein.
AND,
2. The biochemical structure has no evolutionary precursor.
II. To FALSIFY Irreducible Complexity:
Show:
1. The molecular machine still functions upon loss of a protein.
OR,
2. The biochemical structure DOES have an evolutionary pathway
My (limited) understanding is that (1) will nearly always be confirmed.
The problem is confirming (2), the assertion that there is no evolutionary pathway.
Dembski seems to be back online again, with a couple of articles at ENV, one in response to a challenge by Joe Felsenstein for which we have a separate thread, and one billed as a “For Dummies” summary of his latest thinking, which I attempted to precis here. He is anxious to ensure that any critic of his theory is up to date with it, suggesting that he considers that his newest thinking is not rebutted by counter-arguments to his older work. He cites two papers (here and here) he has had published, co-authored with Robert Marks, and summarises the new approach thus:
So, what is the difference between the earlier work on conservation of information and the later? The earlier work on conservation of information focused on particular events that matched particular patterns (specifications) and that could be assigned probabilities below certain cutoffs. Conservation of information in this sense was logically equivalent to the design detection apparatus that I had first laid out in my book The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998).
In the newer approach to conservation of information, the focus is not on drawing design inferences but on understanding search in general and how information facilitates successful search. The focus is therefore not so much on individual probabilities as on probability distributions and how they change as searches incorporate information. My universal probability bound of 1 in 10^150 (a perennial sticking point for Shallit and Felsenstein) therefore becomes irrelevant in the new form of conservation of information whereas in the earlier it was essential because there a certain probability threshold had to be attained before conservation of information could be said to apply. The new form is more powerful and conceptually elegant. Rather than lead to a design inference, it shows that accounting for the information required for successful search leads to a regress that only intensifies as one backtracks. It therefore suggests an ultimate source of information, which it can reasonably be argued is a designer. I explain all this in a nontechnical way in an article I posted at ENV a few months back titled “Conservation of Information Made Simple” (go here).
As far as I can see from his For Dummies version, as well as from his two published articles, he has reformulated his argument for ID thus:
Patterns that are unlikely to be found by a random search may be found by an informed search, but in that case, the information represented by the low probability of finding such a pattern by random search is now transferred to the low probability of finding the informed search strategy. Therefore, while a given search strategy may well be able to find a pattern unlikely to be found by a random search, the kind of search strategy that can find it itself commensurably improbable i.e. unlikely to be found by random search.
Therefore, even if we can explain organisms by the existence of a fitness landscape with many smooth ramps to high fitness heights, we have are left with the even greater problem of explaining how such a fitness landscape came into being from random processes, and must infer Design.
I’d be grateful if a Dembski advocate could check that I have this right, remotely if you like, but better still, come here and correct me in person!
But if I’m right, and Dembski has changed his argument from saying that organisms must be designed because they cannot be found by blind search to saying that they can be found by evolution, but evolution itself cannot be found by blind search, then I ask those who are currently persuaded by this argument to consider the critique below.
John Crace, at the Guardian, has a nice series of “digesteds“. I’m no John Crace, but I’m going have a go at digest of Dembski’s article at ENV, Conservation of Information Made Simple, because it seems to me that Dembski could use an editor with a big blue pencil.
at ENV to get up to date on the Law of Conservation of Information:
So, what is the difference between the earlier work on conservation of information and the later? The earlier work on conservation of information focused on particular events that matched particular patterns (specifications) and that could be assigned probabilities below certain cutoffs. Conservation of information in this sense was logically equivalent to the design detection apparatus that I had first laid out in my book The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998).
In the newer approach to conservation of information, the focus is not on drawing design inferences but on understanding search in general and how information facilitates successful search. The focus is therefore not so much on individual probabilities as on probability distributions and how they change as searches incorporate information. My universal probability bound of 1 in 10^150 (a perennial sticking point for Shallit and Felsenstein) therefore becomes irrelevant in the new form of conservation of information whereas in the earlier it was essential because there a certain probability threshold had to be attained before conservation of information could be said to apply. The new form is more powerful and conceptually elegant. Rather than lead to a design inference, it shows that accounting for the information required for successful search leads to a regress that only intensifies as one backtracks. It therefore suggests an ultimate source of information, which it can reasonably be argued is a designer. I explain all this in a nontechnical way in an article I posted at ENV a few months back titled “Conservation of Information Made Simple” (go here).
So what’s the take-home lesson? It is this: Stephen Meyer’s grasp of conservation of information is up to date. His 2009 book Signature in the Cell devoted several chapters to the research by Marks and me on conservation of information, which in 2009 had been accepted for publication in the technical journals but had yet to be actually published. Consequently, we can expect Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt to show full cognizance of the conservation of information as it exists currently. By contrast, Felsenstein betrays a thoroughgoing ignorance of this literature.
It seems to me that Dembski has still entirely missed the point of Felsenstein’s (and others’) critique of his “Law of Conservation of Information”. But perhaps it’s worth tackling Dembski’s newer formulations here? The Dembski-Marks published papers, or perhaps the For Dummies article at ENV he links to above.
(Link to previous discussion of Dembsi’s Specification paper here, now re-un-stickied)
Stephen B, at UD, says:
Since ID does not, at least for now, hypothesize an “intelligent mind,” …
To which I can only respond – WTF?
Seriously, can any ID proponent explain what Stephen means here, and whether they agree with it?
From the UD resources section:
ID Defined
The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID is thus a scientific disagreement with the core claim of evolutionary theory that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion.
In a broader sense, Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. Design detection is used in a number of scientific fields, including anthropology, forensic sciences that seek to explain the cause of events such as a death or fire, cryptanalysis and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). An inference that certain biological information may be the product of an intelligent cause can be tested or evaluated in the same manner as scientists daily test for design in other sciences.
ID is controversial because of the implications of its evidence, rather than the significant weight of its evidence. ID proponents believe science should be conducted objectively, without regard to the implications of its findings. This is particularly necessary in origins science because of its historical (and thus very subjective) nature, and because it is a science that unavoidably impacts religion.
Positive evidence of design in living systems consists of the semantic, meaningful or functional nature of biological information, the lack of any known law that can explain the sequence of symbols that carry the “messages,” and statistical and experimental evidence that tends to rule out chance as a plausible explanation. Other evidence challenges the adequacy of natural or material causes to explain both the origin and diversity of life.
What possible intelligent causative agency would not have a mind? Does “mindless intelligent cause” mean anything coherent? Apart from, possibly, evolutionary processes? (which could be said, conceivably, to be intelligent but mindless…)
Meta, but possibly necessary: Kairosfocus, at UD, has a long, and, to my mind, very odd, piece that refers to this blog, called: FOR RECORD: I object — a “tour of shame” concerning well-poisoning strawman tactics joined to denial of abuse of design theory proponents at TSZ.
Most of the piece I find frankly incomprehensible, but it includes the accusation that I am “enabling evil” here at TSZ:
And, they particularly need to recognise what going along with or making excuses for activists indulging in evil is: enabling.
This brings us to a live case, one implicating a commenter at TSZ, and unfortunately, the blog owner.
apparently because I did not suppress some comment made by OMagain, in response (as it were, given weirdness of the megaphone communication channel between the here and UD) to a comment by Kairosfocus at UD. Now I don’t, as I say, understand the link KF seems to make between mainstream science and fascist regimes, and like OM, I find it odd that KF on the one hand rightly, in my view, warns of the dangers of suppressing dissent, and on the other, wants me to suppress points of view that dissent from his (or, at least, dissent from what KF feels is a misrepresentation of his point of view). But I want to reiterate my own principles here: I will not ban any dissenting view here unless it advocates illegal activities (and possibly not even then – civil disobedience is often ethically justified), nor any member unless they post content that compromises the integrity of people’s computers (including links to porn or malware). This is precisely because I think that suppressing dissent can lead to great evil, although I would point out that turning down an article for publication is not “suppressing” that view, as KF implies with his reference to Granville Sewell’s rejected manuscript on the Second Law of Thermodynamics (far from it – it’s probably had at least as much currency on the web as it would have done if published in print, and I myself have posted links to it, and invited Granville to discuss it here).. Furthermore, I think discussing dissenting views in as civil a manner as is possible to mortals, can lead to great good.
But KF goes on:
As I’ve mentioned, I’m a great fan of Denis Noble, and recommend his book, the Music of Life, but you can get the content pretty well in total in this video of a lecture:
Principle of Systems Biology illustrated using the Virtual Heart
and there’s other material on his site.
So I was interested to see Ann Gauger making a very similar set of points in this piece: Life, Purpose, Mind: Where the Machine Metaphor Fails.
