(Sorry this is so long – I am in a hurry)
Gpuccio challenged myself and others to come up with examples of dFSCI which were not designed. Not surprisingly the result was that I thought I had produced examples and he thought I hadn’t. At the risk of seeming obsessed with dFSCI I want assess what I (and hopefully others) learned from this exercise.
Lesson 1) dFSCI is not precisely defined.
This is for several reasons. Gpuccio defines dFSCI as:
“Any material object whose arrangement is such that a string of digital values can be read in it according to some code, and for which string of values a conscious observer can objectively define a function, objectively specifying a method to evaluate its presence or absence in any digital string of information, is said to be functionally specified (for that explaicit function).
The complexity (in bits) of the target space (the set of digital strings of the same or similar length that can effectively convey that function according to the definition), divided by the complexity in bits of the search space (the total nuber of strings of that length) is said to be the functional complexity of that string for that function.
Any string that exhibits functional complexity higher than some conventional threshold, that can be defined according to the system we are considering (500 bits is an UPB; 150 bits is, IMO, a reliable Biological Probability Bound, for reasons that I have discussed) is said to exhibit dFSCI. It is required also that no deterministic explanation for that string is known.”
(In some other definitions Gpuccio has also included the condition that the string should not be compressible)
These ambiguities emerged:
Some functions are not acceptable but it is not clear which ones. In particular I believe that functions have to be prespecified(although Gpuccio would dispute this). Also functions which consist of identifying the content of “data strings” (a term which is itself not so clear) are not acceptable because the string in question could have been created by copying the data string.
The phrase “no deterministic explanation for that string is known” is vague. It is not clear in how much detail and how certainly the deterministic processes have to be known. For example, it appears from above the possibility that the string in question might have been copied from the string defining the function by some unknown method is sufficient to count as a known deterministic explanation. This implies that really it is sufficient to be able to conceive of the very vague outlines of a determinist process to remove dFSCI. I think this amounts to another implicit condition: no causal relationship between the function and the string.
Lesson 2) dFSCI is not a property of the string.
It is a relationship between a string, a function and an observer’s knowledge. Therefore, it may be that dFSCI applies for a string for one observer with a certain function but not for another observer with a different function. The rules for deciding which function are not clear.
Lesson 3) The process for establishing the relationship 100% specificity of dFSCI and design is not commonly found outside examples created by people to test the process.
Gpuccio says thisabout the process:
“To assess the dFSCI procedure I have to “imagine” absolutely nothing. I have to assess dFSCI without knowing the origin, and then checking my assessment with the known origin.”
When challenged he was unable to name any instances of this happening outside the context of people creating or selecting strings to test the process as in our discussions. This is important as the dFSCI/design relationship is meant to be an empirical observation about the real world applicable to a broad range of circumstances (so that it can reasonably be extended to life). If it is only observed in the very special circumstances of people making up examples over the internet then the extension to life is not justifiable. To give a medical analogy. It might well be that a blood test for cancer gives 100% specificity for rats in laboratory conditions. This is not sufficient to have any faith in it working for rats in the wild, much less people in the wild. Below I discuss what is special about the examples created by people to test about the process.
A Suggested Simplification for dFSCI
dFSCI says that given an observer and a digital string where:
1) The observer can identify a function for that string
2) The string is complex in the sense that if you just created strings “at random” the chances of it performing the function are negligible
3) The string is not compressible
4) The observer knows of no known deterministic explanation for producing the string
Then in all such cases if the origin eventually becomes known it turns out to include design.
Given the rather lax conditions for “knowing of a deterministic mechanism” that emerged above, surely (2) and (3) are just special cases of (4). If (2) or (3) were present then deterministic mechanisms would be conceivable for creating strings.
So the dFSCI argument could be restated:
Given an observer and a digital string where:
* The observer can identify a function for that string
* The observer cannot conceive of a deterministic explanation for producing the string
Then in all such cases if the origin eventually becomes known it turns out to include design.
Conclusion
There are two main objections to the ID argument:
A) There are deterministic explanations for life.
B) Even if there were no deterministic explanations it would not follow that life was designed
For the purposes of this discussion I will pretend (A) is false and focus on (B)
No one disputes that it is possible to detect design. The objectors to ID just believe that B) true. The correct way of detecting design is to compare a specific design hypothesis with alternatives and assess which is provides the best explanation. This includes assessing the possibility of the designer existing and having the motivation and ability to implement the design. If no specific hypothesis is available then nothing can be inferred.
So is the dFSCI claim above true and if so does it provide a valid alternative way of detecting design?
The trouble is that there is dearth of such situations. One of the reasons for this is that digital strings do not exist in nature above the molecular level. At any other level it is only a human interpretation that imposes a digital structure on analogue phenomena. The characters you are reading on this screen are analogue marks on the screen. It is you that is categorising them into characters. So all such strings are created by human processes. It follows that design is a very plausible explanation for any such string. People were involved in the creation and could easily have designed the string. If you add the conditions that the function must be prespecified and there should be no causal relationship between the function and the string then design is going to be by far the best explanation. It goes further than that. It also means there almost no real situations where someone is confronted with a digital string without knowing quite a bit about its origin – which is presumably why Gpuccio can only point to examples created/selected by bloggers.
What about the molecular level? Here there are digital strings that are not the result of human interpretation. Now human design is massively implausible (except for a few very exceptional cases). The problem now is that carbon chains are the only digital strings with any kind of complexity and these are just the one’s we are trying to evaluate. There are no digital strings at the molecular level with dFSCI except for those involved in life.
So actually the dFSCI argument only applies to a very limited set of circumstances where a Bayesian inference would come to the same conclusion.
Mike Elzinga:
That’s simply not true. Gpuccio, for example, doesn’t use the Gish Gallop. (He changes his argument frequently, often without acknowledging that he is doing so, but the topic remains the same, and so this is not Gish Galloping.)
Also, I’m not interested merely in tactics. The thinking of IDers and creationists is also fascinating. Many of them can see that reason and evidence are at odds with their beliefs. How they manage the dissonance, and how they maintain their beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, is very interesting.
Certainly I encourage folks to study ID/creationist tactics. Debating is not as efficient as sitting down and really dissecting their misconceptions, misrepresentations, and tactics.
But ID/creationists who want to debate aren’t really interested in science; and from what I have seen for many years, I doubt that there are very many who can follow any real science. Most of them have vague, hand-waving ideas they pick up from creationist literature.
What I have seen of them is that they want the practice so that they can win debates. Many declare victory even when they loose. They never learn any science from a debate. By just getting a debate, they think they win.
However, as long as there are people who plunge into debating them, if I happen to see anything interesting, I use the occasion to simply sit back and study. I am generally not interested in debating ID/creationists because their understanding of science is not adequate enough for them to understand any point one is making. They don’t want to learn anyway. It’s just the debate for them.
I personally prefer helping people to understand science; and I don’t like the game-playing of debates. Debates are horribly inefficient at conveying reliable information. ID/creationist debaters are a waste of time for me.
If one is to engage in debates, I would certainly suggest that one come away from such encounters with the ability to do a thorough post-mortem of the debate as far as content, concepts, and one’s own understanding of science.
For the scientist, it isn’t enough just to win a debate; one has the additional responsibility of educating the audience as well. Scientists are at a disadvantage in this regard because they are expected to be responsible for not misleading people.
ID/creationists don’t care; they can make up crap as they go and be glib enough to bamboozle the audience into thinking they are great. It is never a fair match from the beginning; and they already know that.
Debates on the internet are a little different because there is a “transcript” generated; but when threads get as long and and as drawn out as they do here, for example, they stop holding interest, and nothing is every learned by the ID/creationist or any of the spectators who get bored and walk away.
I quite franky got bored with all this gpuccio stuff. Learning something usually doesn’t take that long in real life. When you sum it all up, what have you learned? What else could you have learned with all that time?
Also, with gpuccio it is sometimes possible to zero in on the crux of a disagreement. You can’t do that with Gish Gallopers.
For example:
keiths:
gpuccio:
Almost certainly real biological fitness landscapes do have well-separated islands. Probably all life exists on one of those islands, the others being unknown to us. There might be much better ways to be life, but life never got there.
The issue is not whether there are such islands, but there is more than one such island with present-day life forms on it.
Joe F:
And of course, gpuccio thinks that life is spread over multiple islands, and that it had to be poofed onto each one since unguided evolution is incapable of bridging the gaps between them.
These days I usually ignore Mung, except when he a) displays a misunderstanding that I think others might share, or b) says something that is too funny not to point out. This is an example of the latter:
Let’s take a closer look at Mung’s logic. Suppose gpuccio claims that the designer 1) works through common descent, 2) reuses what already exists, 3) makes changes only on the third Tuesday of each month, 4) fiddles with eukaryotes in the spring and summer and prokaryotes in the fall and winter, and 5) appears to earthly observers in the form of a giant, diamond-encrusted lobster.
I object, saying that the designer doesn’t have to work through common descent, doesn’t have to reuse what exists, doesn’t need to restrict changes to the third Tuesday of each month, can fiddle with both eukaryotes and prokaryotes year round, and doesn’t have to present the appearance of a diamond-encrusted lobster.
By Mung’s logic, I have made five assumptions and gpuccio has made none. Too funny.
Mung should be in logic’s “Hall Of Shame” many times over!
And here are a few Mungish misconceptions that are worth rebutting because others might share some of them:
No, because lineages can share features and still be distinct. Think of different eukaryote lineages, for example.
No. We don’t see complicated structures being “transplanted” simultaneously and identically into 25 distinct lineages. That would be much too improbable to happen by chance.
No, because HGT is explained by known unintelligent mechanisms. As gpuccio will tell you, it’s a mistake to infer design when something can easily be explained by non-design mechanisms.
No. I’ve stated repeatedly that HGT has to be limited in order for an objective nested hierarchy to be inferrable. Note that in Theobald’s example of the 30 taxa, prokaryotes are confined to a single taxon. Thus HGT among prokaryotes doesn’t obscure the objective nested hierarchy.
If you found a case like the one I described, it would be evidence in favor of design. No one has found such a case, however.
Quite the opposite. Unguided evolution predicts the objective nested hierarchy. There are trillions of times more ways for this prediction to be falsified as there are for it to be confirmed. Evolution sticks its neck out and survives unscathed. ID can’t compete.
Not according to gpuccio. See comment #913 at UD.
gpuccio #1:
gpuccio #2:
Gpuccio,
Those statements contradict each other. You need to retract one of them.
If statement #1 were true, it would mean that a fitness function could never legtitimately be included in a model of natural selection. That is obviously false, as you yourself have admitted.
I therefore recommend retracting statement #1.
gpuccio:
As I explained to Mung, you are the one making the assumptions. You state that “the designer needs to act through common descent”. How do you know that?
The answer, of course, is that you don’t. But you need to make that assumption, because otherwise your hypothesis doesn’t fit the evidence and gets tossed out.
A Rain Fairy proponent could make the same flawed argument that you are making:
Why do we see an objective nested hierarchy?
Because gpuccio says the Designer always acts (whether by choice or by limitation) in a way that produces an objective nested hierarchy.
How does gpuccio know this?
He doesn’t. But if he doesn’t make that assumption, then the design hypothesis doesn’t fit the evidence and gets tossed out in favor of unguided evolution, which fits the evidence exactly.
Why does rain happen in low pressure areas, and why do low pressure systems rotate in opposite directions in the northern vs. southern hemisphere?
Because this is how the Rain Fairy operates (whether by choice or by limitation), according to the Rain Fairy advocates.
How do the Rain Fairy advocates know this?
They don’t. But if they don’t make that assumption, then the Rain Fairy hypothesis doesn’t fit the evidence and gets tossed out in favor of modern meteorological theory, which fits the evidence exactly.
Gpuccio, isn’t it a little embarrassing to be making the same argument as the Rain Fairy advocates?
This could be summed up by saying that ID proposes an unobserved, discontinuous process to replace a regular process that is routinely observed, without proposing any agent capable of performing this activity,
All predicated on the truth of the isolated island metaphor,
It’s really that simple.
Now can we please have a thread discussing the island metaphor? Everything else about ID is superfluous.
Petrushka:
That’s pretty much it. I would only add a few things:
Gpuccio’s argument is an attempt to rescue ID.
ID comes into the fight with a huge disadvantage: it makes no predictions. Evolutionary theory, by contrast, makes risky predictions that are confirmed by the evidence. This includes the prediction of an objective nested hierarchy, which is validated to a spectacular degree of accuracy.
Gpuccio’s only hope in this lopsided battle is to show that unguided evolution doesn’t really explain the objective nested hierarchy. The “islands of function” assumption is intended to accomplish that. Unfortunately for gpuccio, he can’t justify the assumption, so he is left arguing that until the fitness landscapes are mapped in sufficient detail, the default must be to assume that life occupies isolated islands.
Even if he could justify the “islands of function” claim, gpuccio still has a problem: ID doesn’t fit the evidence. He makes additional unjustified assumptions to correct this.
The complete list of assumptions he must make:
1. Assume that life occupies isolated islands in the fitness landscapes, so that unguided evolution is ruled out.
2. Assume that a designer exists at the appropriate times and places.
3. Assume that the designer has the necessary capabilities to do the job.
4. Assume that the designer just happens to operate in a way that mimics unguided evolution (if unguided evolution were not ruled out by #1).
Gpuccio’s argument depends on all of these assumptions. He hasn’t justified any of them.
Funny you should say that. I’ve been working on one and hope to post it tonight or tomorrow.
You could certainly do worse than start with Darwin’s own formulation of the problem.
Hey, kairosfocus, read my comment. I didn’t accuse gpuccio of being a Gish Galloper. I defended him from the charge.
You, however, accused me of something I didn’t do. If you were in my position right now, you would be demanding an apology, as we all know from long experience. Since the tables are turned, will you be offering an apology, or will you choose instead to be a hypocrite?
He’s got *very* upset (comments closed) here:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/darwinism/notice-on-the-gish-gallop-false-accusation-tactic-and-fallacious-dodge/
KF – read carefully before you go off on a rant, or you might just look silly.
It is very peculiar to read this kairosfocus character’s comments on the Gish Gallop. He is a master at the Gish Gallop himself.
I was looking in on the discussion of entropy and thermodynamics a few of months ago when Sal Cordova posted his disagreement with Granville Sewell over on UD. Of course, the KF character jumped right in with tons of copy/paste material.
This KF character’s responses were classic Gish Gallop. KF dumped boatload upon boatload upon boatload of totally bogus material on several threads over at UD when all that “discussion” on entropy was going on. Some of it was simply crap that he made up out of thin air, and other stuff was simply copied from sources he quote-mined without comprehension.
One seldom sees such a witch doctor caricature of mumbo-jumbo voodoo dumped in such a copious manner in order to overwhelm the discussion and give the appearance of great erudition and deep understanding. And all of it was thrown in with an air of confident authority and condescension. The kindest thing I can say about KF is that he is a complete, double-down, triple-down fraud.
But that is the nature of UD; and that is why one should study them and not try to debate them. They have no clue; but they use every Gish tactic developed at the ICR to bully and bluster as though they are experts in all things. That has been the case ever since Morris and Gish started the ICR; and it has been ever downward and dirtier from there. The tradition continues at UD.
Now those people over at UD are trying to rewrite their own history using the same tricks. It isn’t going to happen.
keiths:
gpuccio:
Gpuccio,
You’ve changed your position yet again without acknowledging it. Reread this comment of yours and note the bolded portion:
gpuccio:
And in particular, the objective nested hierarchy. The problem is that you know nothing about the designer, so you can’t independently justify your assumptions. He’s an unknown designer (maybe more than one), with unknown abilities, unknown limitations, and unknown goals.
The only “justification” you offer for your assumptions is that you want to fit your hypothesis to the evidence of the objective nested hierarchy. But then you’re committing the Rain Fairy fallacy.
It’s the equivalent of this:
You are arguing against a Rain Fairy proponent. You point out that under the Rain Fairy hypothesis, there is no reason to expect low-pressure systems to rotate in opposite directions in the two hemispheres. Any wind pattern is compatible with the Rain Fairy hypothesis, so it is completely arbitrary to assume that the Rain Fairy just happens to choose (or is somehow limited to choosing) the counter-rotating scheme.
Your opponent responds, “I am making a simple and reasonable assumption. I assume that the Rain Fairy likes symmetry, and this is why low-pressure systems rotate in opposite directions in the two hemispheres.”
Are you persuaded by the Rain Fairy advocate? If not, then why should we be persuaded by your argument, which is logically identical?
To summarize, the problem is that if you know nothing about the designer, you can’t independently justify any assumptions you make about him. And if you try to force-fit your hypothesis to the evidence by simply tacking on arbitrary assumptions, then you are committing the Rain Fairy fallacy.
You’re being too specific, I think. The Rain Fairy fallacy applies generally to gods, who are typically unconstrained and undefined, and can be used as a post facto explanation for anything. I defy you (or gpuccio or anyone at UD) to point to anything whatsoever, such that “the Designer chose to do it that way” wouldn’t be a “perfectly reasonable explanation”.
Absolutely. That’s my point, but I find that people “get it” better when I use a specific example that they immediately recognize as ridiculous, such as the Rain Fairy.
Another one I like to use is the hypothesis that angels are pushing the planets around, but that they just happen to choose the same paths that gravity would have produced if it were operating in the solar system.
Well, I’ve never seen anyone get through whether using general principles or specific examples. Personally, I think it’s reflected in the terminology. If you speak of garden fairies, or zeus, or the Great Green Arkleseizure, they know it’s silly fiction so they ignore it. If you attribute all the same characteristics but ascribe them to God, suddenly the toilet training kicks in, their god is REAL (when spelled right), and all manner of idiocy becomes “real”.
To those not infancy-trained to associate the word-icon “god” with indubitable certainty, with magic, with explicit support of whatever they might prefer to be true, everything the UD people argue is clearly insupporable. For those trained from infancy, they CAN not see it no matter how deeply your cram their face into it.
So I kind of feel sorry for gpuccio. I agree that he has recognized that his arguments fail, and the more he tries to reposition them, the more they fail. He is unhappy because he KNOWS his arguments MUST be true, god said so, but he just can’t find any way to explain it that isn’t arrant nonsense from the start.
The same pattern informs all of the UD arguments. They are all roundabout ways to find their non-negotiable god hidden SOMEWHERE in a perverse reality that needs no such hypothesis. I think I’d be depressed if I could find NO direct evidence for what I was trained to believe was true, and had to make up threadbare arguments and defend them with censorship, doubletalk and bafflegab.
gpuccio:
No, convergent evolution is not a violation of my rule. I wrote:
Complicated convergent structures are not genetically identical and they are unlikely to happen simultaneously. To get complicated, identical structures in 25 distinct lineages requires design.
My observation is that “convergent evolution” is easily misrepresented. At a high enough level of abstraction, everything converges. Motility is common in organisms, so motility is convergent evolution. Where motility is not a strategy, then being stationary is convergent.
Get a bit more specific – look at flight, or at sight. Both are very useful, so one would expect numerous very different approaches to these abilities. And so on.
Where “convergent evolution” breaks down is where we go from the functionality level to the mechanical level. Multiple similar solutions to the same general problem is qualitatively different from multiple mechanically identical solutions.
I don’t think creationists want to understand the difference between homologies at the structural level, and similarities at the functional level. Birds, bats and bees all fly. HOW they fly is completely different. Hummingbird flight is MUCH more like eagle flight than like bumblebee flight.
keiths wrote (I leave out the details):
Gpuccio,
You’ve changed your position yet again without acknowledging it.
That is a pretty noticeable example of a self-contradiction. Wonder what gpuccio will say.
But in any case there is another contradiction. Some hundreds of messages ago, gpuccio and other commenters at UD were raising a completely different objection. Not to the fitnesses being unnatural. But that using a computer algorithm to model the reproduction of a population could not investigate whether CSI could be put into the genome by NS because the CSI is already there in the code that reproduces the digital organisms.
Now they seem to have a different objection, the one about naturalness of the fitnesses, and they do say that some kinds of simulation might be able to investigate this. Have they abandoned that earlier argument?
I doubt it’ll be “oh, I was wrong, the whole idea was flawed from the start, can we start over”?
IDists believe in design despite the lack of evidence, not because of it.
I don’t think simulations can address the actual fitness landscape or whether islands are isolated. That still needs to be done by Lenski, Thornton, et al.
What simulations can do is explore the abstract mathematical argument, and that argument is DOA.
What Axe, Behe, Dembski and that tribe have done is take the last series of Lotto winners and argue that there must have been fraud involved, because the odds against those particular people winning, taken as a group, are prohibitive.
In the world of DNA, they pretend that the path taken was the only possible path.
Did anyone else notice Cornelius Hunter’s blog where a commenter, RobertC, linked to Todd Wood’s take on this paper by McLaughlin et al? Seems yet more confirmation that fitness landscapes are not so rugged as some have surmised.
That Nature paper should come as no surprise; basic textbooks in organic chemistry have made this point for many decades. Function and behavior are more often related to structure rather than the specific constituents.
And there is a good physical reason behind that; it has to do with the way that structure and charged distribution in complex systems of molecules are interrelated.
Also, increasing smoothness in the shapes of potential wells always occurs with increasing complexity. Binding energies among constituents decrease with complexity.
The “smoothness” of potential wells is also related to the relative sizes of the potential energy well depths and the thermal kinetic energies of the bound constituents. If it is soft matter, the wells are smooth.
Fitness landscapes are directly related to the binding energies of the atoms and molecules that make up the organism. It’s all basic physics and chemistry.
This is the paper I hoped would form the basis of a new thread on islands of function. It looks like the creationists have responded in a creative way. Because most substitutions don’t have any effect, proteins can’t evolve.
If you would like to start a thread, let me know. I think I am able to give you that ability.
I’m not sure, but I think you can contact me with the mail link on the front page of TSZ. Alternatively, click on my name to get to my blog, hold out mouse over the “about” tab near the top of the page, and you should see a “contact me” link.
If gpuccio’s basic argument is about “islands” of function, then his dFCSI concept has nothing to do with SI or CSI or FC. These concepts developed out of Leslie Orgel’s SI. They involve a scale of some sort (the canonical example would be fitness), and the idea of CSI is to define some region far enough out on the scale that pure mutation, unaided by natural selection, cannot be expected to get you there even if every particle in the universe was an organism, mutating as fast as particles interact.
So the argument is then that something nonrandom must have gotten the organism there. Then there were supposed to be theorems showing that natural selection could not have done that, leaving Design.
What has the whole argument about “islands” got to do with that?
Joe F.:
Many (perhaps most) of the IDers concede that natural selection is effective, but they claim that its effectiveness is limited to microevolutionary change.
In other words, they think:
1) that organisms are spread across multiple “islands of function”;
2) that movement within each island (i.e. microevolution) is possible via mutation and natural selection; and
3) that movement from island to island (i.e. macroevolution) is impossible via mutation and natural selection, because the islands are too far apart. Therefore the Designer operates an inter-island ferry service.
There are many problems with this argument, of course, but that’s what they’re claiming, and that’s why gpuccio agreed with me when I wrote:
Aack, this is seriously misleading mostly because it embodies the creationist picture of “macroevolution” as one current “form” morphing somehow into another current “form”.
They envision these islands as having been poofed into existence at creation. We DO note that no current form morphs into another current form, so we do not observe macroevolution. This model doesn’t lend itself to the notion of islands splitting into two or more islands and drifting gradually apart, until the distance between them can no longer be bridged.
Evolution is the process of making new islands. Not travelling from one existing island to another.
OK, thinking about it a bit more, my most recent comment was ill-thought-out. To answer my own question, I think the relation of SI, FC and CSI to gpuccio’s “islands” is that we make our scale the extent to which the particular function of these sequences is achieved. The distance out on that scale would be big enough if that much of that sequence could not be achieved by mutation alone. So it sort-of is related to Dembski’s argument.
Still, there is no proof that natural selection cannot get that far. And we know how gpuccio responds to this — he declares that it is an empirical generalization to which no exception has yet been found, and that no proof is needed.
So I guess it is not possible for more energetic transitions or tunneling to improbable states to occur in physics and chemistry. All biological creatures are tightly bound solids that no amount of energy or tunneling can change.
Oh dear; chemistry never happens! How did the entire scientific establishment miss the polls that have been saying that all along?
A common feature of Creationist argumentation is an inability to distinguish the continuous and the discrete. Finding the underlying pattern involves trying to go behind one’s own perceptions of how the world presents itself to us. I wonder if they think that the rainbow really is divided into 7 bands, rather than the physical interaction of photons of different wavelengths with our restricted set of opsins, and the subsequent brain processing …
One finds this in the certainty that, variously, species cannot change at all, or they cannot change beyond a certain range within a common morphology, or that a protein has a ‘function’ and can wobble about in that discrete patch but never outside it.
One could change one letter of a book every 1000 years. At no point does the text become anything other than a minor variant on what went before. And yet cumulatively, over say 100 million years, 100,000 substitutions have taken place, enough to obliterate the original. Books are islanded, of course. They must be comprehensible to be ‘viable’. And so in comes that other Creationist favourite, the argument from analogy. The space of all books is islanded, so the space of [string-system X] must also be islanded. One can therefore (fallaciously) eliminate incremental progression (including that concentrated by differential fitness, the ‘functional/specified’ part) as a ‘necessity mechanism’.
Languages present the best analogy I can think of for evolution. They are semiotic, their elements are discrete, their implementation is always physical.
Yet they evolve. we have written histories showing their evolution in great detail.
And we have examples like Basque, that are isolated and have no known historical connection to other languages.
I understand that languages are used by “intelligent” agents, but I have not seen any intelligence directing their evolution. Actually the reverse. Intelligent agents appear to oppose their evolution and take active steps to hinder their evolution.
The use of language turns out to be an important tactic of the ID/creationists.
Those who can recall the heyday of the “scientific” creationism vs. evolution debates back in the 1970s and 80s will remember the most common settings and the atmospheres in which those debates took place.
They were often sponsored by local “Creation Science Associations” – these sprung up all over the country – and the audiences were bussed in from surrounding churches to support the creationist debater. They hooted and cheered in all the right places when the creationist debater evoked his practiced, sneering jabs at evolution. It was pure political theater.
The rules of engagement in these debates were usually written by the creationists, and they usually included a rule forbidding the “evolutionist” from bringing up the connection between “scientific” creationism and sectarian beliefs.
The other main feature of these debates was that the creationists insisted on the language to be used. Every taunt and every critique of science was couched in the language of the creationists. Their opponents were expected to answer using creationist concepts and language. Any attempts on the part of the opponent to correct the concepts and language would be met with some kind of implication that the person, even though an expert in the science, didn’t understand science and the methods of science. Gish and Brown used this tactic quite agressively.
ID/creationists are still using these tactics today on their websites. That UD website is a classic example, as are the AiG and ICR sites. Over at UD they appear to have recruited the hecklers also. There are at least two flying monkeys over there who are constantly flinging feces at anyone who takes issue with any of the big gurus.
All the language over there is made up ID/creationist language. They have their own “information”, their own “function,” their own “entropy,” their own “second law of thermodynamics,” their own “kinds,” their own rules about atoms and molecules, their own “mathematics,” their own “fitness landscapes;” no matter what it is, they have their own version of it and expect their opponents to speak in their language. They don’t acknowledge or accept any of the concepts and language developed around science.
So anyone who wants to debate them is expected to answer in their language and put up with their hecklers. Answers that use concepts from science are not recognized or acknowledged. Whenever any ID/creationist opponent makes a good point, they are immediately bombarded with the Gish Gallop in the form of huge dumps of copy/paste junk along with a condescending scolding.
Not only is ID a child of “scientific” creationism by political design in order to get around the courts, it contains all the same language, the socio/political tactics, and the same sets of fundamental misconceptions and misrepresentations.
And now they are trying to use the Gish Gallop to distance themselves from “scientific” creationism while claiming that they intellectually legitimate with no sectarian motives.
Mike Elzinga has pointed out that UD commenters have their own definitions of many terms. I’d add “model of evolution” as another one that they have assumed that they can redefine.
Yes indeed!
Henry Morris and Duane Gish hammered on this from the beginning. Evolution was defined as organisms getting better and better and better; progressing upward toward “higher” states, toward more perfection, and toward lower entropy.
Then Morris threw in the ultimate refutation of “evolution” – as defined by the creationists – by redefining entropy and the second law of thermodynamics and asserting that this “fundamental law of the universe” directly refutes “evolution” (as defined by creationists).
They blasted this at biology teachers and at the general public. I have in my files multipage newspaper clippings of the generous coverage given to creationists by local newspapers at the time. In these newspaper articles creationists – claiming to have doctorates of some sort – would be laying out all these definitions and carefully painting the contradictions with their charicatures of science.
They “uncovered the hidden skeletons in the closets of the science community;” and with copious use of inuendo, they labeled the scientific community as a bunch of deceivers. The books and booklets published by the ICR were the classic, paranoid diatribes against the “dark secrets” of evolutionists. Evolutionists were “exposed” admitting that they didn’t really believe there was any evidence for evolution.
Everything coming out of the creationist movement was fabricated. My impressions at the beginning of all that were that it was so stupid that nobody would take it seriously. I was wrong; as were many others in the science community. We didn’t know how extensive or organized it already was. We were simply very naive about those kinds of socio/political tactics.
I still look back and shake my head at the brazeness of Duane Gish harrassing teachers in front of their students. Schools were much more open back then; and Gish would simply latch onto a fundamentalist student to “invite” him to visit their biology class.
Mung has a “gotcha” moment:
Link two sentences somewhat separated in my original post. Point out that genetic change is digital at the lowest level and – bingo! – my point is neatly obfuscated by definology, or so Mung appears to believe, though he rather helps to illustrate it (and Mike’s, that word gaming is at the heart of much of the argumentation). I’m sure there is no such thing as a continuous sound generated from an MP3 file either, if you had responsive enough speakers and ears. And let’s not forget quanta!
My continous/discrete distinction related to biological categories, of which I provided examples – species, ‘kinds’, or protein function, sets around which we can attempt to draw our wiggly Venn-diagram lines. Incremental genetic change can (on the evolutionary paradigm) move populations hither and thither. The wiggly lines aren’t fixed – we, categorisers, draw them. If we lived long enough, we’d have to keep redrawing them. The Creationist, however, sees these lines as indicative of some fundamental essence: ‘macro-discrete’ categories between which Mung’s pedantically ‘micro-discrete’ genetic change cannot travel.
gpuccio:
It’s a shame that you find consistency so boring, because science depends on it. If you want your argument to be taken seriously, it needs to be consistent, and that means correcting your inconsistencies when they are pointed out to you.
You previously stated quite adamantly:
Now you have reversed yourself:
Those statements contradict each other. Which do you affirm, and which do you retract?
If gpuccio really is able to identify dFSCI, then I would ask him to consider the following experiment:
First, examine the dog genome for obvious examples of dFSCI. I should think that ID predicts, implicitly, that there ought to be at least one example unique to dogs.
Second, examine the genome of a species widely believed to be of another “form,” yet close to the dog lineage (at least by evolutionary thinking), like that of the domesticated house cat. Again, there ought to be at least one unique example.
Third, use the dFSCI data from the previous steps to determine the status of an animal that may or may not be an intermediate form, like that of true foxes — is Vulpes a product of “micro-evolution” or of the Intelligent Designer(s)?
Not only would this be a practical example of dFSCI’s ability to detect design, but it would also be the first step towards an ID version of Linnaean taxonomy — a map of the actual islands of functionality found in nature.
Mung (#949) doesn’t “get it”:
However dumb I may be, even I realize that the four haplotype frequencies have to add up to 1. So you can’t increase all of them at the same time.
The issue was whether a new type could come into existence as the result of natural selection. These are haplotypes. In the original population there were 1,000,000 mosquitos and an expected frequency of the AB haplotype of 0.00000001, which means basically no AB’s at all. After gene frequencies of A and of B increase by natural selection, now there can very easily be AB haplotypes. So we have answered the question, and you are wrong: natural selection creates the conditions for AB to exist.
(To anticipate the usual objections:) Yes, recombination is involved too, but without the natural selection it would not make AB’s. The semantic quibble that natural selection doesn’t do it without another evolutionary forces such as recombination is that, an irrelevant quibble.
And yes, the frequencies of some of the other haplotypes will decline. That is very sad for them, but this will always happen when the population’s mix of genotypes changes.
Finally, yes, it is merely a matter of probabilities. Population genetics kind of tends to be that way. :-)
So Mung’s (#931) assertions that because natural selection both increases and decreases frequencies of genotypes, it’s not special, and by implication can do nothing are wrong. When land vertebrate forelimbs evolved from fins, the frequencies of alleles that made fins decreased as the frequencies of alleles that made limbs increased, and that is not a problem for evolution.
Mung (UD Jerad thread #987) has continued to try to (mis)characterize natural selection as ineffective. My comments were directed toward one issue: whether natural selection could bring about the appearance of new combinations of alleles, the example being a haplotype AB.
The example I gave did require recombination to be present, to put together the two alleles once they are present in high enough frequency to make this event probable (another possibility involves mutation at one locus once the allele at the other is frequent enough). Yes, of course it is possible for that event to occur when A and B are very rare — it is just very improbable for AB to exist in the population in the example I gave. Mung had made it sound as if natural selection had no effect on whether new combinations of alleles would occur. It would have a big effect in this example. So Mung was wrong about that.
As I have explained above, I made no assertion that this meant that all haplotypes increase as a result. I explain above that if some haplotypes become less frequent, that is no problem. I did not use the term “combinatorial probability generator” nor do I think that is a useful phrase.
The rest of Mung’s comment is word games. The issues are not those Mung imagines, and I have no interest in spending time on those.
I wanted to discuss one more detail which will end up being one more reason why this thread has run its course. It had been suggested (by patrick on December 4 at 10:29pm above) that the
tierrasystem would be a simulation of evolution by natural selection, mutation, and some other genetic forces that might meet gpuccio’s conditions. Thus it could be used to see whether dFCSI would arise in such a simulation.gpuccio had asked (UD “TSZ and Jerad” thread comment #919) for more explanation of what tierra is. I am not going to do that here, instead I will just point out this link to the tierra home page where there are links to much more about tierra.
But there is a problem. dFCSI requires an assessment of “function”. tierra has no clearly definable function other than survival — whether a particular genotype persists. I cannot easily see how we could use that to assess “function” for dFCSI. Survival is assessed purely empirically by whether the genotype comes to take over the tierra “world”, or whether it persists in it. That cannot be evaluated prospectively. One cannot compute fitness by examining the genotype and using a table of genotype fitnesses (as one can in more conventional population genetics models of evolution). Thus there is no way to know whether the fitness is very high just by looking at the genotype.
So this suggestion will probably not fly. gpuccio might (wearing the “Oracle of Naturalness” hat) declare it sufficiently “natural”, but functionality would probably prove impossible to assess in a way that gpuccio would approve.
gpuccio has seemingly also ruled out GA-type models (although keiths has pointed out contradictory statements gpuccio has made on this point, and there is as yet no clarification of the matter by gpuccio).
So we seem still to be in the situation that there is no tractable model that gpuccio would approve of that could be used to investigate whether gpuccio’s claims are plausible.
Mung has corrected me (in UD Jerad thread #988) on my wording on two points: I should have said “survival and reproduction” instead of just “survival”. And yes, the “function” needed is the function of a digital organism within tierra, not the function of the whole simulation.
If there is some other “function” Mung has discerned for the genotypes in tierra, it would be interesting to know what it is — I don’t see it.
Perhaps when gpuccio has looked more closely at tierra, we can be told whether there is any other “function” available in tierra, and gpuccio can clarify whether or not a simulation like tierra can be used to assess dFCSI. Until that is clarified there is little more to say.
One of the more interesting features that arise in some tierra runs is parasitism followed by hyperparasitism. I wonder if those qualify as functions.
As you say, though, any discussion is blocked pending clarification from gpuccio.
Actually Joe, I was thinking of Avida and not Tierra, but I got lucky, lol. After all, what’s an evolutionary simulation without reproduction!
I need to take a look at Tierra specifically. I haven’t seen gpuccio in a few days =p. I hope he’ll return.
Is there no scenario in Tierra according to which some organisms leave more offspring than others?
Do you consider Tierra to be an evolutionary simulation? If not, why not? Is it because you can see no implementation of natural selection?
gpuccio:
You still haven’t resolved the contradiction. I responded to your #941 here:
Gpuccio responds:
In other words, you would like to change the meaning of your statement without admitting that you are changing anything.
Instead of:
You want your statement to mean this:
Your refusal to admit your mistake is just silly, but can I at least get you to agree, for the sake of future argument, that the revised statement is correct?
I am really curious about the power of itnelligent selection. I have asked for several years why gpuccio thinks IS is superior. I’m specifically interested in how IS would apply in the Lenski experiment.
What I want to know is how the intelligent selector knows to favor neutral precursor mutations, those that confer no immediate reproductive advantage but which enable later mutations to become adaptive.
How does this work?
Gpuccio,
You also haven’t responded to this comment:
Gpuccio’s response:
Gpuccio,
You won’t answer it because you can’t answer it. Pretending it’s stupid is just a way of saving face.
You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place:
1a. Unguided evolution is far better than ID at explaining the evidence of the objective nested hierarchy.
1b. Meteorology is far better than the Rain Fairy hypothesis at explaining the weather.
2a. The Designer is an unknown being with unknown abilities, unknown limitations, and unknown goals. ID therefore predicts nothing, and can be fitted to any set of facts about life by simply saying “that’s how the Designer did it.”
2b. The Rain Fairy is an unknown being with unknown abilities, unknown limitations, and unknown goals. The Rain Fairy hypothesis therefore predicts nothing, and can be fitted to any set of facts about the weather by saying “that’s how the Rain Fairy does it.”
3a. To bring ID into alignment with the biological evidence, you have to make a bunch of assumptions about how the Designer operates.
3b. To bring the Rain Fairy hypothesis into alignment with the meteorological evidence, you have to make a bunch of assumptions about how the Rain Fairy operates.
4a. There’s no independent justification for the assumptions you add to the ID hypothesis. You’re just forcing ID to fit the evidence. All the work is being done by your arbitrary assumptions, not by the theory itself.
4b. There’s no independent justification for the assumptions you add to the Rain Fairy hypothesis. You’re just forcing the Rain Fairy hypothesis to fit the evidence. All the work is being done by your arbitrary assumptions, not by the theory itself.
Where does all of this leave you? You’re in the embarrassing position of either
a) supporting both ID and the ridiculous Rain Fairy hypothesis, or
b) admitting that unguided evolution fits the evidence far better than ID, just as meteorology fits the evidence far better than the Rain Fairy hypothesis.
Rather than facing up to this, you’ve chosen to avoid the dilemma by pretending that the argument is stupid — and hoping that someone will believe you.
kairosfocus weighs in on the Rain Fairy argument. He predictably makes multiple references to strawmen, then just as predictably proceeds to set up and topple his own strawman.
In other words, if you assume that evolution isn’t a credible explanation of dFSCI, you will conclude that evolution isn’t a credible explanation of dFSCI. Take that, evolutionists!
We know that design can produce functional complexity, but that doesn’t justify the conclusion you’re leaping to: that only design can produce functional complexity. Where’s your evidence?
I’ve shown that unguided evolution explains the evidence literally trillions of times better than intelligent design. I even challenged you to respond, placing absolutely no restrictions on the venue, format, or length of your response. You’ve been evading the challenge ever since. Why is that?
I’ve made no such demand. You would know this if you had bothered to familiarize yourself with my argument before presuming to criticize it.
I take issue with Gpuccio’s assumption about design reuse not because I think he should have assumed the opposite, but because I think he is not entitled to assume anything at all, unless he provides independent justification for his assumptions. Otherwise he is committing the Rain Fairy fallacy. See this comment.
ID can be made to fit design with reuse, or design from scratch. It can be made to fit modular design, or monolithic design. It can be made to fit anything at all, by simply stipulating that the Designer must have done it that way. ID is infinitely malleable. It fits anything, which means that it predicts and explains nothing. That is its great weakness.
Evolution is the better theory.
You’ve stated the case very well.
ID doesn’t bring anything to the table in the way of mechanisms and is thus useless as an aid in understanding why life responds to the environment it finds itself in.
ID also doesn’t answer another important question and that is, “How does the designer know what will be required in the future?”
petrushka,
Think WEASEL. Think Genetic Algorithms.
Explain what WEASEL is in your own words, and what it is intended to demonstrate.
Toronto:
And yet you managed to post on this site. No intelligent design required.
The people who designed this web site had no idea what you would post here on December 13, 2012. How on earth did they manage to design for what would be required in the future?
You seem to be on our side again with your analogy.
The website designers foresaw the need to host comments and designed a site that would accept a combination of ASCII characters to represent those comments, but they did not require any knowledge of what the actual configuration of those ASCII characters in my comment would be.
Tell me what the weather will be like in a hundred years
There is no spec anyone could write that would give us enough foresight to modify the “information” in every single biological design that would require change to exist in that unknown future environment.
How does the designer know what to change for an unknown to him, future environment?
How many organisms would be affected by this change?
Who will be affected more, herbivores or carnivores?
Should he hedge his bet and make 70% of the organisms herbivores to balance out predator/prey relationships?
So?
There’s no rule of design that demands that designers must plan for all possible future contingencies. Our universal experience with known designers indicates that there is no such requirement.
Design me a program.
Here’s what it has to do: ………………..
Your code is a critical component so let me know right away if you can’t meet any part of the spec.
WEASEL is a computer program written by Richard Dawkins as an exercise in demonstrating the “power of cumulative selection” in which strings of characters are copied and mutated and then compared to a target phrase with those strings which more closely resemble the target phrase being selected to seed the next round, repeating the process until a string exactly matching the target phrase is found.
There are various other versions of it in many different programming languages freely available on the internet.
It’s a fine example of the power of intelligent selection, though that’s hardly what Dawkins intended to demonstrate with it.
When your side comes up with a version of it that uses natural selection, rather than intelligent selection, we can compare the differences in “power” and answer petrushka’s question.
Get busy.
Please.
Give us an operational definition of natural selection, so we will know what to shoot for.
Toronto:
Program 1:
puts “………………..”
Program 2:
20.times {print ‘.’}; puts
Program 3:
def print_periods how_many
how_many.times {print ‘.’}; puts
end
Program 4:
def print_char chr, how_many
how_many.times {print chr}; puts
end
First we’ll need to work together to write tests, that way we’ll know when the program has met your specification(s).
Way to miss the point, Mung darlin’.
By the way, Toronto, look up YAGNI.
The intelligent designer had better know what’s coming in the future and prepare for it.
If he doesn’t, he’ll be modifying our “code” 24/7.
In that case, science would be impossible since the intelligent designer will be interfering with natural processes on a daily basis.
Designers of fighter aircraft can’t ignore a future that’s decades away and neither can the intelligent designer.
What intelligent designer?
How about a designer of disposable razors or cotton swabs?
You don’t know that they aren’t. How would you know?
That. in a nutshell, is why ID is useless.
Once you have made the assumption that natural processes are capricious, you have abandoned any hope of doing science, because science is the business of finding regularities. The short answer is that you cannot be certain that nature is not capricious or that the fabric of reality is manipulated by the matrix masters.
But based on the last couple hundred years, that’s the way to bet. When theists get sick, most will go to a doctor who relies on reductionist scientific medicine.
EDIT:
All the sciency machinery of ID is engaged in the hunt for discontinuities. Gaps, if you will. Miracles by another name.
All the work and writings of Axe, Dembski, Behe, et al, are deployed to find events and phenomena that cannot current be explained. I Some argue that there is some utility in that, because it sometimes suggests areas that need to be studied.
But it is highly inefficient, because science goes to those places anyway. And it is entirely ineffectual, because unexplored areas shrink.
That’s why ID is a non-scientific concept.
This. Not that Mung will ever admit it.
And yet science continues.
Not that you will ever understand the point.
ID != Science
Stumbled across the following post by gpuccio:
Intelligent selecion is a powerful principle, as shown in bottom up protein engineering.
There are two fundamental differences between IS and NS:
a) IS can select for any defined function, even if not immediately useful. NS can select only for those functions that give a reproductive advantage in a specific context (that is, an extremely tiny subset of all possible functions).
b) IS can select functions even at very low levels. IOWs, IS can recognize a function even in its raw manifestation, and then optimize it. NS requires that the function level be high enough that it can give the reproductive advantage at phenotipic level.
Both points are extremely important, and both points are the consequence of the intervention of intelligence and purpose in the process. Moreover, bottom up IS can well be integrated with top down engineering in the design process.
All those possibilities are denied to non intelligent processes.
Meanwhile, gpuccio’s challenge remains.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/education/the-tsz-and-jerad-theread-iii-900-and-almost-800-comments-in-needing-a-new-thread/#comment-441833
petrushka:
That is incorrect.
The painstaking research is in. That’s what allows us to identify the protein superfamilies. It is that same painstaking research which allows us to say that the intermediates are missing.
Someone has done research and concluded that billion-years-dead genomes are no longer available to sequence? I wonder if I could get a slice of that funding?
Allan:
Send your grant proposals to:
Biologic Institute
16310 NE 80th Street
Redmond, WA 98052
USA
What has Gpuccio’s Challenge shown?
Gpuccio’s Challenge has shown that you cannot refute his claims.