Granville Sewell has a video up on YouTube:
Mark Chu-Carroll has a take-down of the argument here, but I’d be interested to know what the ID proponents who post here make of it. It seems to me so self-evidently wrong, that I’d expect ID proponents to be rather keen to point out the errors, but it gets a shout-out at UD.
The reason it seems to me so evidently wrong is nothing to do with intelligent systems versus non-intelligent systems, but that quite simply, biological organisms do not violate the second law of thermodynamics, which states, as Flanders and Swann ineradicably taught me: you can’t pass heat from a cooler to a hotter:
In order for biological organisms to develop, reproduce, populate an environment, and evolve, they must utilise energy. And they do. Plants store sunlight energy as sugar, and then use that to grow and reproduce. Animals eat plants – or other animals, in order to gain energy, and grow and reproduce. As a result, the heat is dissipated, the universe as a whole gets slightly cooler (though there might be temporary local rises, as when I tried to climb a little mountain in Anglesey yesterday), and will continue to do so, as far as we know, until the whole universe is a uniform temperature and no heat can pass from one region to another.
So the apparent argument that biological organisms violate the second law of thermodynamics, therefore intelligent design, is based on a completely false premise. They don’t. There may be be perfectly good arguments for an ID but biological organisms violating the 2LoT isn’t one of them. Do any of our ID-supporting members disagree with this? If so, can you say why?
No, you should learn about the SLoT, and that the term “blind watchmaker” is meaningless, especially in regard to the SLoT, and that no one has to explain the universe to you with regard to the “blind watchmaker” and the SLoT.
What is your actual point about the SLoT? Are you saying that the SLoT isn’t true? Are you saying that evolution doesn’t occur? Are you saying that an extra cosmic being performs miracles that defy the SLoT? Are you saying that the universe and life forms were and are specially created? Are you saying that a God did it? Are you saying that a God designs and causes tornadoes and everything else?
No, you are mistaken as the blind watmaker just refers to materialism- I will call it sheer dumb luck if you like as that is all it boils down to.
And yes your position needs to explain the universe.
This is true in a sense, William – there is no reason to assume it, although given the evidence in support, it is often useful to do so. However, there are certainly no grounds to claim that the mechanisms we know of are sufficient. We never will know whether our models are sufficient and there is a sense in which we can be confident that they never will be. The way science works in practice is not by “falsification” but by comparing the fit of competing models to the data. And no model is ever, or can be, a perfect fit – perfectly sufficient.
Ah, well, if that is what you mean by “sufficient”, then I disagree. Our models are perfectly “plausible” – or they wouldn’t be scientific models. They need to invoke mechanisms that can be shown to work, and which predict new data.
In that case, we probably don’t disagree much about ID. My beef with ID (why I said it was “fallacious” in another thread) is that ID proponents (Dembski, Behe, Meyer, Abel, and others) claim to produce probability values for non-design models so low that they render it false, and ID the only valid inference.
In contrast, no evolutionary scientist qua scientist claims that the probability of non-ID is so high as to render ID false. ID is unfalsifiable, because it is compatible with any data, including data that are also compatible with non-Design. A non-Design mechanism could account for every single observation, and yet Design be true.
So if all you are saying is that you are skeptical of current evolutionary theory – fine. We all should be. There are certainly things that current evolutionary theory does not readily explain, including, but not restricted to, the origin of life.
It’s the jump to an actual ID inference that we find fallacious. Or I do, anyway.
As far as you. I, or anyone else knows, this universe may have come from a Big Bang that was one of a whole series of such – the rest of which simply re-imploded in the first few yoctoseconds because a set of mutually compatible laws, forces, energies, constants – whatever – failed to become established.
That’s as good a theory as any of yours. I shall test it immediately after breakfast or after my apotheosis, whichever is the later.
Test it.
It is unclear to me quite how the ‘anti-chance’ adherents expect science to represent the answer to their implicit challenge. If known ‘natural’ causes are a sufficient explanation in principle for the observed patterns in Life, within the strictures of the ‘real’ 2LoT or any more metaphorical version – a vague Law of ‘Pattern’ – how could we convert that into a ‘proof’ that is digestible by people with
a) Very little science, on the whole.
b) A deep-seated desire to believe in a higher power.
?
b) shouldn’t even be relevant, but it so clearly gets in the way of any open-minded desire to understand the science. You go to university to pass exams, get a qualification, get a job. You make an effort. If you don’t try and understand the science, you fail. But if you are just arguing on the internet, testifying or trying – for whatever personal reason – to dismiss what the scientists say, how much effort do you put in? Well, in the case of a notorious few, the effort is clearly absolutely enormous, but it is directed entirely towards NOT getting it.
But laying such trolls aside, even sincere advocates seem to me to be sealing themselves in an intellectual cave into which we could not infiltrate this ‘proof’ even if it were available. Which is just how they want it. Unless you can prove that undirected Nature could get from microbes to monkey, evolution has nothing? No more effort is likely to be put into understanding this imaginary definitive, digestible proof than is put into the currently available more disparate strands of the science that underpins the current consensus. It could pass all the peer review in the world, but there’s something wrong with it, somewhere … there’s gotta be!
Show me a Creationist and I will show you someone with a shaky grasp of science. Engineers who think cells are just like tiny jumbo jets; mathematicians and astrophysicists who think that probability is all you need to invoke in assembling protein, or that complexity is the sole preserve of Intent; computer programmers who think that DNA is ‘just’ information; nature lovers who think species are anchored to some essential ‘type’ by invisible, undetectable threads; logicians who think that Natural Selection is only a process of ‘removal’ (so is sculpture), or that molecular interactions are governed by ‘chance’; people of every stripe who fail to understand the significance of the genotype/phenotype distinction for evolution and complexity, or the manner in which Life obtains and distributes energy (and its fascinating, deep link with ‘information’, not through bogus conflations of definitions of entropy, but through that remarkable molecule, ATP) …
… and the challenge is to prove that it isn’t like their misconception says it is!
Thornton, you didn’t answer my question. I would also like to ask it of Allan Miller, and I still need to hear from Mike Elzinga: are any of you evolutionary biologists or mathematicians?
Elizabeth: I disagree with much of what you wrote in response, as I often do, but I don’t find debating you on those items to be fruitful. I just didn’t want to leave you thinking that we were largely in agreement.
heh.
Well, we do seem to be missing each others’ points, I guess
But if you are not inferring ID from the low probability of any alternative, then I don’t have a problem with your position.
And I would, in fact, be interested in hearing from you how you disagree, but I understand if you don’t think it would be fruitful.
WJM,
No. I have a degree and research experience in biochemistry/molecular biology. My current profession is software design. From these, I have a pretty good grounding in the fundamental nature of the things we discuss – how DNA and proteins work, what information means (and why DNA is not), why the genotype/phenotype distinction is important, for evolution and for the individual organisms thrown up by the process, what molecular Common Descent predicts, how energy flows between molecular configurations, how complexity builds from the bottom up, the apparent limits to intentional design as chaos takes over.
My mathematics is poor, frankly, and hence (since “evolutionary biology” is highly mathematical), my formal evolutionary biology is not up to the standard of my first degree. But I have made strenuous efforts to redress that, to read and learn and grasp the population-level processes, by writing my own computer models and wading through textbooks. I’m no expert – but then, many evolutionary biologists know bog all about chemistry!
I’m also a keen naturalist, and am familiar with the ways in which individuals of the same and other species interact, the commonality of their constraints, and the way exponentiation held in check by a finite world works in replicative/selective systems right from polymerising DNA in a test tube, or digital ‘solutions’ in a GA, through E. Coli in a chemostat, right up to herds of elephants or grasses in a pasture. (It’s all about copying!).
In short: jack of some trades, master of none. If you want a professional evolutionary biologist’s opinion, see Joe Felsenstein.
Mr. Miller,
I appreciate you answering my question.
If that were required of science, then Newtonian science should never have been adopted.
Not only was it never shown that nothing else is required – we eventually went to relativity and QM because clearly something else was required.
All that science actually requires, is sufficient explanation to lead to further research and further growth of knowledge.
I am not a professional mathematician or evolutionary biologist, although I have college level training in both. I’m a Senior Systems Engineer with 30+ years experience for a company that develops remote sensing platforms – spacecraft, UAV, submersible – for studying the Earth’s environment.
Like Allan Miller above, I am also a keen naturalist. I dabble in geology, collect fossils, study the local fauna and flora. I also read the scientific literature regularly (Nature, Science) to keep up with the latest scientific developments in biology and genetics.
Any arguments I offer here will be supported appropriately and will stand or fall on their own merits, not on my CV.
Now please answer my question. What reasons besides your own personal incredulity do you have for saying current evolutionary theory is not scientifically plausible?
There isn’t any way to test it.
How can we test the claim that accumualtions of random mutations can construct new and useful protein complexes?
So perhaps you coyld start by presenting a testable hypothesis pertaining to necessity and chance- good luck
So your mysterious position doesn’t need to explain anything- got it- all science so far.
Look YOU made the accusation pertaining to the blind watchmaker- don’t blame me because you can’t support it.
I
Actually, you are claiming that science is wrong and that you are right, but you either can’t or won’t support your claims, or even clarify your claims when asked questions about them. You must think that science is obligated to prove everything to your personal satisfaction and if it can’t it must be wrong and you must be right about whatever it is that you think you’re right about. Science doesn’t work that way.
If you want to affect science I would suggest that you gather whatever evidence you think you have and present it in a well written paper that you submit to a reputable peer reviewed journal. Complaining about science on the internet may make you feel as though you’re accomplishing something but it won’t change the way science is done and it won’t get your claims accepted by science.
I didn’t make any accusation pertaining to the blind watchmaker. You’re the one who uses that term and you’re the one who can’t or won’t support your position (whatever it is) with evidence and by answering relevant questions. I get the impression that you are very young and not well versed in scientific subjects. It would behoove you to expand your education in science at a good college, after you finish high school, and then you should have a better interpretation of how science works.
It seems to me that if one were to watch a movie showing an adult slowly reverting to a toddler, then to a fetus, and shrinking to a blastula, while the cells are merging, stands of DNA joining together (spewing out unlinked nucleotides), shrinking into an embryo which separates into gametes, it would be just as obviously “unnatural” as a tornado assembling a house.
I think this shows how misguided the linkage between thermodynamic entropy and complexity is.
I think this is important. The logic of the arguments can be probed by anyone, even though we may have to take the evidence itself on trust to some extent. But that is always true within science itself – when papers are peer-reviewed, the reviewer does not actually re-run the analyses to check the math, or check that the data really are as reported. What is reviewed is the coherence of the argument, and whether the hypothesis that is claimed to be tested was in fact tested.
Often reviewers raise an alternative interpretation of the data. This should (and generally is) welcomed, and the paper modified.
It’s probably worth pointing out that the peer-review process isn’t simply a vetting – it’s part of the scientific process itself, and papers that do get published are usually revised in light of reviewers comments. Sometimes several times. Even when a journal rejects a paper, the paper usually will be revised in light of the reviewers’ comments before submission elsewhere. At least I normally do that.
Many years ago I was attending a meeting of the American Physical Society. That year it happened to be held in Washington DC.
In one of the plenary sessions, Victor Weisskopf was giving a talk on the history of The Physical Review, of which he had been the editor for a number of years.
Weisskopf was noting the rapid increase in the number of publications in that journal that resulted in its being separated into a number of different specialty areas; and he also noted the rather rapid deterioration in the quality of the papers being submitted.
To illustrate how the journal was growing in size exponentially, he visualized the journal sitting on a long shelf and imagined the velocity at which the right-hand end of the journal was increasing with time.
He then used the current velocity and acceleration to calculate the time in the future when the right-hand end of the journal was traveling faster than the speed of light. And then he said, “But that’s ok because there wouldn’t be any information in it anyway.”
It was a good physicist’s joke which brought the house down.
Well, I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. When I review a paper with math in it, I do check whether the analysis is correct (as long as the math is not too difficult for me – if it is I tell the editor), and I expect the same from reviewers who review my papers that have math in them. To some extent the same holds for data. Meta-analyses are quite popular these days, thanks to online availability of papers and meta-analyses tools (e.g. the metafor R package), and reviewers should check IMO, if possible, whether the right numbers from the papers were used in the meta-analysis (surprisingly often this is not the case), or at least sample a few papers.
/rant
Just reposting this (from the coin-toss CSI thread) to a more appropriate home. It’s part of my campaign to give Gravity the credit it deserves for being the True Creative Force in the Universe! :0):
Elizabeth:
I’m not sure about that bit in parenthesis. IANAP, but shortly after the Big Bang, the entropy of the universe was presumably lowest, and has been getting higher ever since. Yet when entropy was lowest, the universe was (again, presumably) quite uniform. But the ‘energy available to do useful work’ was high. The extreme density may have had something to do with the ability of energy to equilibrate in such a circumstance. We have since had expansion, which reduces available energy (or smears it out, at least), but at the same time, that bizarre force gravity has made some very non-uniform distributions of matter (or ‘crystalline energy’, one might New-Age-ily call it) . Where those collections are big enough, nuclear fusion is ignited which releases vast amounts of energy from that matter (and makes ‘chemistry’). That energy is not retained by the same force it was when it was matter, so it is free to equilibrate – to rush outwards into space and become unavailable for work.
Essentially, when you have mass, moving towards equilibrium (increasing entropy) actually involves creating a non-uniform distribution of matter. Responding to the ‘pull’ of gravity converts the potential energy into kinetic energy of fall, with entropy-increasing energy losses on conversion and on arrest of fall. You have to put energy back in if you want to move the masses apart again.
If you don’t have mass the equilibrium situation (no gradient) is a uniform distribution in space. But if you do have mass, the equilibrium is a uniform surface – again, no gradient, quite literally. But I am emphatically not a physicist, so am prepared to be told that is all bunk! :0 )
OK I let Granville know this thread exists (I posted links to it in his new thread on UD)
Thanks, Joe.