A prominent ID supporter at UD, gpuccio, has this to say:
My simple point is: reasoning in terms of design, intention and plans is a true science promoter which can help give new perspective to our approach to biology. Questions simply change. The question is no more:
how did this sequence evolve by some non existent neo darwinian mechanism giving reproductive advantage?
but rather:
why was this functional information introduced at this stage? what is the plan? what functions (even completely unrelated to sheer survival and reproduction) are being engineered here?
Gpuccio references actual biology in his writings and is one of the few at UD that do, and as such I’m prepared to take him at his word that the ID project is now ready to move from simply determining design to answering the questions he posed:
- why was this functional information introduced at this stage?
- what is the plan?
- what functions (even completely unrelated to sheer survival and reproduction) are being engineered here?
If any ID supporter would like to provide a specific example with answers for those 3 points for discussion that would be perfect.
Gpuccio’s OP concludes:
The transition to vertebrates was a highly engineered process. The necessary functional information was added by design.
In response I simply repeat back the question what is the plan?
If someone could add the title ‘what is the plan?’ that would be great!
Gpuccio:
So cute, ignore the fact that those mechanisms exist, and are well known, and then:
I really, really want to know what the mechanism is that this unknown designer used to “introduce functional information”
I believe the technical term is quantum handwaving but I await correction from those that know better.
I see this as a simple question of efficiency. Answers require a huge amount of work. Questions are easy. Why would the brave new science promoters of tomorrow wish to encumber themselves with all the messy business of answering questions when it is so much more streamlined to simply change them?
I think gpuccio should be commended but he’ll quickly find he’s opened an unpleasant can of worms
A major talking point of prominent ID advocates going back to Johnson has been that scientists are unable or unwilling to consider design. This is not true of course. For almost 300 years scientists have been studying the Pyramids in terms of design. The same could be said for countless other things: Stonehenge, Roman catapults, the Antikythera mechanism etc. When scientists use a design paradigm the questions they ask ( and answer ) are ‘who designed it?’,’ why did they design it?’, ‘what constraints were they working with?’, how did they solve each individual problem with the resources at hand?’. etc .etc.
The reason IDers have been unwilling to take their “study” past vague, general assertions of design may be because they intuitively know that if you use a design paradigm to study things that weren’t designed you wind up spinning your wheels and wasting your time in a very obvious way.
I am prepared to give the question, “what is the plan?” a go.
It is my belief that the plan comes from a formative “subtle body” which is beyond our physical perception. For an analogy think of a bar magnet. The lines of force are imperceptible to us but their presence is made apparent when iron filings are scattered round the magnet.
Physical substance condenses according to this plan. Cartlidge turning to bone is an example of this condensation.
This idea is obviously out of favour at the moment but I am willing to have a sensible, civilised discussion about it. Sarcastic comments and insults I will do my best to ignore.
C’mon, everyone knows the plan was to have the Design look exactly like unplanned evolution as much as possible as a test of your religious faith. Looks like the evolutionary scientists all failed. 🙁
I think what you describe is not quite at the level I had read into gpuccio’s comments.
So to me the “subtle body” idea you mention is more “how” than “why” and “why” is what I thought gpuccio was getting at.
To extend this idea then, if physical substance condenses according to the plan you mention, what should it be doing once it has condensed?
The question isn’t about development but about evolution. And we know how cartilage turns to bone. There are cells whose job is to do just that. No mystical forces necessary.
Adapa,
I think the odds are that unplanned evolution would look like bowls of toxic slop that destroy anything else it comes into contact with.
If there was no plan that were certainly win any arms race nine times out of ten.
But then again, if there was no plan, the entire universe would also just be a big bowl of slop as well, with no laws whatsoever, so, I guess it would win an arms race even less than that because there would be nothing to start one.
I agree that my post is not an answer to the question “why?” but it sets the scene before I give my views on that question.
The vertebrate body is a preparation for producing a being that can develop self consciousness and beyond. Physical matter condenses to allow conscious “substance” to ascend from it. The human body has evolved despite it being a less physically capable vehicle than many other animals.
Drop the theology guys, this is supposed to be an attempt by Gpuccio at making actual scientific claims based on ID. Can you help him out or not?
dazz: Drop the theology guys, this is supposed to be an attempt by Gpuccio at making actual scientific claims based on ID. Can you help him out or not?
I think this sort of thing is a good start
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/works1.iv.html
That the final destination is unplanned doesn’t mean the processes involved are all random. A rock that falls from the top of a mountain will follow an unplanned path as it bounces downward but gravity ensures it will always end up at the bottom.
Why did the plan take over 500 million years and involve at least 5 major mass extinction events? Each major mass extinction took out a majority of the vertebrate life forms and allowed for subsequent development of newer vertebrate classes and orders. Seems not much of a plan to me.
“There is a plan” is the hypothesis here, so let’s see how much explanatory power you guys can inject into that idea. Rambling about how lack of a plan is this or that doesn’t add anything to the discussion, unless you can show empirically that there needs to be some plan I guess. But without some level of detail and explanatory power, “a plan” is quite a meaningless and useless hypothesis
phoodoo,
Quite. Hence this thread. ID has declared victory and is proceeding with uncovering the plan.
There is no need to explain what you believe evolution would look like without ID. We’re past that.
A theory must explain all of the available data and ideally, to maximize it’s explanatory power, should do it in a way that it places a restriction on the set of observations it can explain as to be as close to what’s being observed as possible. For example if we have this set of data:
1, 13, 8763, 9, 5, 67215887
Some possible explanations are (from lowest to highest explanatory power):
Symbols
Real Numbers
Natural Numbers
Odd Natural Numbers
“Odd Natural Numbers” would be the preferred explanation, for it’s the one with the best explanatory power.
So after over a century of collecting data, it’s to be expected that “The Plan” should conform to all of it and should explain all of it better than evolution.
Bring your A game IDists
If ID really allows improved reasoning in terms of design, intention and plans is and really is a true science promoter which can help give new perspective to our approach to biology then it’s surprising that supporters of ID continue to want to talk about evolution and ‘soup’ etc.
If I could add a new perspective to our understanding of biology that would have real world benefits I’d be doing it not spending 100% of my time denigrating the team that just lost.
Yeah, I mean forget about current IDists. Show biologists ID is onto something and they’ll jump ships in the blink of an eye. If IDists are not interested in answers, (formerly evolutionary) biologists will
The whole is reflected in the parts. And we know how brick walls are built. By coordinate effort. No mystical forces just intelligence. Ancient humanity knew about magnetic attraction. They didn’t know about the ins and outs of electro-magnetism. Does this make them mystical forces?
And what about if it were a human in place of the rock? Can you still be certain that the event was unplanned?
Pretty sure if a human fell from the top of a mountain the human will follow an unplanned bouncing path down the hill to the bottom too.
Why wasn’t Michaelangelo’s David created immediately and why was there so much wastage of marble? Do you also see it as not much of a plan?
You speak almost entirely in deepities. We know how bones are built. Not by mystical forces, not by intelligence, but by cells following developmental signals, interaction between genes and interior environment. There is no need or evidence for whatever you think is behind it.
Did Michaelangelo screw up the marble block and have to start over 5 times, each time with a different result?
The universe is very large. Is it not more likely that ‘the plan’ if there is such relates to something we have not yet determined or imagined rather then something actually to do with us directly, who occupy an unimaginably small part of it?
To put it in terms of your analogy, it’s like the block of marble is 100 light years square. And your claim is then like saying we’re the dust that collected against one cm of it, but the whole block is nonetheless vital and part of the plan for the dust that happened to collect along one edge. It’s much more likely the universe is here for another purpose than to bring about us. If indeed it could be shown to be here for any purpose at all. Which it cannot, of course.
So, no, if you cannot account for the unimaginable scale of the universe in any sort of plan that relates to us I’ll find that plan entirely unconvincing.
What he’s basically asking for is description, not explanation. What is the plan? What functions are being engineered here?
Well, why not, what is the purpose? What rationale exists for host and parasite, predator and prey, heterotroph and autotroph? How did the Designer know in what ways the information would interact with the extreme complexity of the organisms, let alone with the organisms’ ecologies? What desires were being fulfilled by the Designer? Why did the Designer repurpose genetic information like evolution would, rather than fitting “design” to “need” more rationally rather than highly derivatively of ancestral information? The reason is that these are more like science questions, and have no hope of being answered (really answered) by ID. Gpuccio’s questions are questions that the worshipper would ask, like, what awesome strategem was unfolded by the Designer?
Even when they pretend to do science they really don’t do very well, because the causal answer is still just “Because that’s what God wanted.”
Glen Davidson
I’ve been reading Gpuccios article and he seems to compute “functional information” in terms of bit-score BLAST comparisons with human proteins: the higher the match to the human protein, the higher “functional information” is. Clearly he’s assuming the plan has been fulfilled and it’s us
What?
Who could have seen that coming?
Glen Davidson
True, and it’s particularly hypocritical considering that a good portion of his post is devoted to how little we know about the regulatory system. There’s an entire field in biology dedicated to that, but of course the fact that Evo-Devo is all about finding those explanations won’t stop him from pretending that the regulatory system is evidence for a “plan” that doesn’t even care about explaining those things
To them or us?
What a fucking waste of time Gpuccio’s article is. The same old retarded tornado-in-a-junkyard crap, spiced with some bogus self-centric “information” theory
Dionisio makes a comment on the thread at UD:
I think in a way Dionisio has missed the point. They have won, they say. And as such they have changed the ground rules. Instead of expecting, wanting, people to argue for non-existent neo darwinian mechanisms Dionisio should turn his efforts towards answering Gpuccio’s question what is the plan?
What the ‘polite dissenters’ are no doubt waiting for are for you to live by your own claims and actually find a way to start to answer those questions that you say are now the questions to be asked! What further value is there in Gpuccio arguing with dissenters? You know the questions that need answering!
If somebody has claimed that they now have a way to reason in terms of design which can help give new perspective to our approach to biology then the logical thing for the ‘polite dissenters’ is to let them demonstrate that new perspective is is productive.
Any refutation, if such was needed, can come after the demonstration!
I have a question for the experts. I’ve tried a couple BLAST comparisons to reproduce some results in gpuccio’s graph.
ASTN1: I get a score of:
Humans vs Danio rerio: 2110 (E value=0, ident 80%)
Humans vs chimps: 2673 (E value=0, ident 99%)
But when I searched for lancelets, the only entry I found for astrotactin was this:
http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/C3ZHZ3
The BLAST run vs humans:
Human vs Branchiostoma floridae: 334 (E value=2e-81, ident=27%)
That ident seems to be very close to simple random match, so there’s basically no match. That seems to suggest that’s not even the same protein. Is that right? Gpuccio got the same score, but makes no mention to idents or E-values.
Could it be that he’s comparing the wrong sequences?
EDIT: Now I notice that the E-value is actually very close to zero for Human vs Branchiostoma (2e-81), does that mean that the match is indeed significant?
Debate crypto-creationists in the terms that they establish, and they generally win. They win by maintaining a debate, not by winning the debate. Where they win is in the conservative judicial mind. (I suspect that they have won already, and that the fate of public-school instruction in religiously motivated “theories” of biology depends entirely on whether it is Trump or Clinton who appoints the next two or three Supreme Court justices.)
Crypto-creationism is at bottom a legal theory established by law professor Phillip Johnson, largely influenced by the dissenting opinion of Justice Antonin Scalia in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard: science is a function of worldview, and the present constraint on what public schools teach in biology courses is viewpoint discrimination; while government institutions must not promote religion, they also must not discriminate against religious perspectives. The last clause seems to contradict my application of crypto- to creationism, but actually does not. Crypto-creationists prefer to take the position that “intelligent design” is not inherently religious, but have prepared to argue, “Even if it were religious…”
What the Disco ‘tute learned from Kitzmiller is that it’s not enough to talk about the possibility of an alternative science. They immediately forked the Biologic Institute (which, to my knowledge, has produced nothing but a house journal, a green-screen photo of Anne Auger in a lab coat, and Douglas Axe’s new book). There came at the same time the Evolutionary Informatics Lab of Bob Marks (which the DI lists under research at its website).
Gpuccio is a bit behind the curve with his stab at science under non-naturalistic assumptions. There came before it Jon Bartlett’s Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference, funded by the nonprofit Center for Evolutionary Informatics (which, as I recall, was first headed by Barry Arrington, and is now headed by Marks). The story the crypto-creationists want to tell to the courts is, “Hey, we have our science, too. And it’s just as good — nay, better, in some ways — than science limited by a materialistic worldview.”
Respond to gpuccio as though he’s actually trying to do science, rather than to create the appearance in a propaganda outlet that “intelligent design” activists do a different kind of science, and you aid and abet the crypto-creationists. The crypto-creationists are constantly accusing scientists of concocting explanations to save their worldviews. And the reason they do that is, of course, that they require science — investigation of the general revelation — to jibe with their simpleminded takes on scripture — the special revelation.
This is the kernel of a good response. No one would make present-day homo sapiens into the target of all evolutionary processes without religious belief — it cannot be regarded as anything else — that the ultimate purpose of life is to generate humans.
If those are protein sequences rather than DNA sequences, 27% is way better than random.
Yeah, they’re proteins, and looks like I’m missing a couple of those, LOL
Thanks John
You say “we know how bones are built”. I say we have a very basic, simplified understanding of how bones are built. And the more we learn the more coordinated complexity we find.
Here is research giving details of just one aspect of the process, cell movement in a 3D matrix.
This underlines the orchestrated activity involved in the laying down of physical form. Anyone who has handled the bones of any vertebrate cannot but be impressed by how wonderfully sculpted they are.
I’m sure most of us have seen the forming of the face of a frog. Physical substance is arranged in accordance with the template dictated by energy fields.
Genes do not determine this form, they are the means by which the form can be realised in physical substance.
As far as I know life on earth did not cease and then have to start over 5 times during its history. Life has progressed to the point where individual living beings are consciously aware of themselves and their surroundings.
Would you say that the annihilation of caterpillars or tadpoles during the forming of butterflies and frogs respectively is a case of the lives of these organisms being screwed up as you put it?
Even if these were DNA sequences, the simple assumption of a bitwise random identity of 25% needs refinement. I’m not sure how BLAST ‘ident’ scores are evaluated in detail, but I understand they start with an alignment of a couple or three bits and then extend either way until they pass a parameter threshold. Scores on that basis will be very different from ‘random’. The more runs of alignment one finds in a comparison, and the wider they are, the less random it is. That applies not just to the alignment but to the bits that don’t match. If quarter of a sequence aligned perfectly but the overall bitwise count was 25%, the non-aligned bits must be ‘less than random’ (a moot point, of course, if you can’t even align them!).
Allan Miller,
Here’s the link in case anyone wants to check
Five mass extinctions, charlie. Not the end of life. Just enormous reductions of variety.
I think the percentages are way off, however. Most living things are bacteria, and most protein coding genes originate in bacteria. And bacteria are unlikely to participate in extinction.
You mean in the same way that the variety of cells that make up a caterpillar must be enormously reduced in order for the subsequent increase in variety in the pre-planned development of a frog?
And the vast majority of cells that make up a tree are dead. But without them the tree could not exist as a living entity. The essential nature of an entity is not always determined by superiority of numbers. Higher conscious animals could not exist without life’s bacterial and vegative foundations.
And it is so fortunate for us that genes which enabled us to form were already present in simpler forms of life. They had much greater potential for future use in those distant times. Much in the same way that the cells of a blastula have within them the potential to provide for the formation of the animal they grow to become.
(facepalm) Caterpillars don’t turn into frogs. I was discussing the five major mass extinction events in the last 500 million years. Each one wiped out between 50% to 90% of all species alive at that time.
Explain how those events were part of the “plan” so that after 500 million years and millions of species going extinct humans were the desired goal. If the Chicxulub impactor had come by an hour sooner or hour later it would have missed the Earth entirely. We could easily have ended up with no humans and sentient dinosaurs instead typing on the web.
God’s sandbox for armaggedon, obviously
Once again, deepities. What you see here is the interaction of genes, gene products, and the physical environment they create. No mysterious archetypes are necessary, and there is no evidence that any such things exist.
If Gpuccio is not willing to comment here, maybe he would be willing to ask Barry to grant another amnesty. 🙂
Gpuccio@UD: “But are you really all banned? Just to know…”
I can’t speak for others. But I can honestly say that I am. As Acartia, Acartia_Bogart, Tintinnid, William Spearshake, Sleeman Tallcan, Ziggy Lorenc, and many others. Admittedly, I deserved some of my banninations. But most were simply for disagreeing with Barry, Gordon or, more recently, Bornagain77.
I would certainly like to discuss this issue but life is too short to do it across two threads simply because of the juvenile behaviour of the moderator at one of them. But I do do commend your attempt and your civil approach to the issue.
Everyone here has been banned at UD. it’s possible that some bannings have been lifted secretly, but who wants to post where you are not wanted, and where you can be banned for having a point of view?