I see that Denyse has taken time away from misinterpreting / misrepresenting decade old articles she found on google to visit our little home. Come on in Denyse! Would you like a cuppa? Don’t worry, there are no “Brit Toffs” here.
Listen, as you’ve stopped by, we’d like to have a quick chat about UD:
Frankly, we’re a bit disappointed. We were hoping for some design science to chew on, some CSI calculations to review. But instead we were saddened when we learned that neither Barry Arrington nor KairosFocus understand CSI. We’re going to give you a little time to get up to speed with the literature so that we can re-engage when you know the stuff. You don’t need to make up more acronyms like FIASCO: FOCUS on mainstream ID concepts. We may find fault with Dembski’s work but he was leagues ahead of where you are now.
Start here:
http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf
There’s an EleP(T|H)ant in the room that you need to come to terms with. Perhaps when you understand the source material we can have a better chat (and therefore more posts).
We also note that UD has expanded to more general science denialism / Republican talking points. Are you sure you want to do that? Pretending to be a science blog was more entertaining.
Well thanks for dropping by. We’ll keep our ears to the ground and report back if scientists ever isolate the specific, “selfish gene”.
Let me be less inflammatory. Dembski’s original method was, in effect, to have some axis and some rejection region on the axis. For my toy case, the axis would be fitness. Dembski’s original CSI (at least the version we thought he stated) had the rejection region set so that the probability of being in the rejection region was below his Universal Probability Bound, say 10 to the -150.
My example showed natural selection pushing the population farther and farther out on the fitness scale, by changing the gene frequencies. If I had used 1000 genes instead of 100, it could have pushed it all the way to the rejection region.
So gene frequencies count, not because the organism is unimpressed by what you say, and not because some gambler is made happy. But because if you want to use some version of CSI, change of gene frequencies, by normal evolutionary mechanisms, shows that CSI or your FCSI can be achieved by those mechanisms. Which was the issue I wanted us to address.
So you are an empiricist then? Interesting, I have never met one. I have met many who believed that they were, or pretended to be, but I have never met a person who does not use some method to make presumptions about that which has not been empirically established. As an empiricist, I am sure that you would never make such an error, right?
Change in allele frequency is not totally irrelevant. It is, however, irrelevant as an answer to the question of how all of the complexity got into the DNA.
Oh, I see, you don’t know what an empiricist is, but rather insist that it has to be something that could never work.
What a surprise.
Glen Davidson
And so begins the fighting regress retreat. Will we use abiogenesis or cosmic evolution as our shield. Of course, there will be no corresponding design narrative…
brucefast,
I asked brucefast: “What was its preexisting definition? And why do you use the acronym “FSCI” instead of CSI, dFSCI, or FSCO/I? Which one is the right one (or are they all referring to the same thing) and who has the “right” to say so?”
He responded: “If I understand the various acronyms (which I only lightly do) each is a subset of CSI. As for my acronym, its clear intent is to prune the tree of CSI stuff (such as pi) from the specific kind of CSI stuff that is of interest in biology. On who has the right to say so, well anyone can make up their acronym. The test of the effectiveness of the acronym is the way it plays out in the public forum.”
Well, if you want to “prune the tree of CSI stuff (such as pi) from the specific kind of CSI stuff that is of interest in biology” you should be much more specific. Frankly, your response is evasive gibberish.
I said: “In case you missed them, here are my previous questions again (keep in mind that there are four letters in the acronym “FSCI”, which stands for functional, specified, complex information):”
brucefast responded: “FSCI is functionality specifying complex information, not “functional specified.” It is functionality which is caused by the specification (order of nucleotides in this case).”
Can you show where any other promoter of FSCI has said that it stands for “functionality specifying complex information”?
I asked: “Will you please show your calculations for measuring the amount of “FSCI” in DNA? Who or what is the specifier of the alleged specifications? Is there anything in the universe that is not functional? If so, what? Is there anything in the universe that is not ‘designed’? If so, what?”
brucefast responded: “Discussed from a quantitative and qualitative perspective, above.”
Where? All I see is some stuff about ‘bits of complexity’ (or was it ‘bytes’?), with no foundation for any of it.
I asked: “What’s your response to this: “There’s an EleP(T|H)ant in the room that you need to come to terms with.”?”
brucefast responded: “The elephant in the room is that we interpret the data based upon our philosophy of life. It is rather hard to convince a person that the data means something other than what their philosophy dictates that it should.”
You’re just running from P(T|H) like all of the other ID pushers.
brucefast also said: “Now for the real question, have you come to terms with it, or do you believe that you are exempt from elephantitis?”
What is that supposed to mean?
In the comments of the UD article, I see Robert Byers values this site. He reports having “a great discussion on flood dynamics.”
Please do not hit head against anything hard.
brucefast,
I think you’d need to be a bit more specific about the complexity you consider within the reach of evolution and that you think can’t be reached.
I suspect it’s fundamentally replication itself, and you’d be right. Evolution (defined either as change in allele frequency or descent with modification) requires replication. Evolutionary algorithms tend to implicitly assume a ‘replication module’ which is immune to mutation, and hence does not itself evolve. To this module are attached the strings of interest, and these strings form the population. Evolutionary computation uses the capacity of such a copying competition to ‘optimise’ a solution.
Real organisms have their ‘replication module’ interspersed with the ‘other stuff’, of course, and all of it is subject to evolution. But until some kind of minimal replication arises, evolution cannot occur.
In short, we need to grant that the minimal conditions for evolution have been met if we are to assess evolution’s capacity wrt CSI in the post-replicative world – ie, the world of modern biology and its ancestry going back at least to the earliest replication-competent ancestor(s).
Denyse @UD
Good God, the irony! Anyone got any questions … anyone … ?
GlenDavidson,
It seems that it never occurs to critics of empiricism that, while it is of course perfectly true that we do have various presuppositions that we bring with us to make sense of experience, it is possible to revise those very presuppositions in light of experience, and that the whole point of science is to do exactly that deliberately and systematically.
(In more philosophical terms, there is a distinction between a priori and a posteriori statements, but it is not an absolute distinction. The empirical discoveries of one generation of inquirers can become the unquestioned background of the next generation, and sufficiently radical empirical discoveries can call into question what had gone unquestioned for centuries or even millennia.)
Science is empirical, not because we generate our theories in a quasi-mechanical matter from the causal impact of the world on our senses, but because we deliberately set out to test our theories against what we experience in the field or lab.
How about calling empiricism imagination put to the test.
Look at my slightly-later comment. The example is precisely what Dembski is talking about. There is a scale of specification, in this case fitness. Movement on that scale is change in gene frequency.
Although Dembski sometimes “cashed out” specification in terms of algorithmic information theory, he did so in a way which actually rewarded simplicity, not complexity. An organism had specified information to the extent that its structure could be produced by a small algorithm.
He also said in No Free Lunch in 2001 that specification could be “cashed out” in other ways, including “viability”. Viability is a major component of fitness, which is used in my example.
In short, my example is one to which Dembski’s argument should apply. And in my argument specification increases as a result of natural selection.
Do you have some argument that this will not happen?
“Cashed out”! Your secret is revealed by your use of that phrase: You do read the philosophy stuff after all!
Although I guess the scare quotes indicate an ambivalence about using it.
Thanks for the reading suggestions. I’ve added the Johnson to my list, but I was not convinced by Noe’s “Out of Our Heads” claim that the consciousness extended into the world and Rowlands looks like it might be on the same line (although I liked his Wolf book).
I am going to wait until Andy Clark (pdf) is convinced before exploring the radical extended mind stuff further.
I’ve never understood the expression. Does it refer simply to a change of units? For example, 10 meters per second “cashes out” as 22 miles per hour?
What is the mechanism you propose to explain that complexity getting into DNA?
brucefast,
Can you point to a specific, single example where the concept of FSCI has been used successfully to advance human knowledge?
Or, failing that, a single calculation of it, i.e. a named thing with a specific, actual value for FSCI?
If not, who are you trying to fool? You or me?
Or failing that, a single instance of a numeric comparison of the FSCI in two genomes. Say a human and an amoeba.
If you graphed the quantity of FSCI in all genomes, would you expect a curve, and if so, what would you expect to see in the lower and upper percentiles. and why?
I’m happy with that.
BruceS,
Thank you for the article by Clark. I have no trouble with embodiment for consciousness but I agree that the idea that consciousness per se is extended (and not just embodied) a bit hard to take. But I find myself quite sympathetic to mental content externalism, so the extended mind thesis as a thesis about cognitive functions does not strike me as beyond the pale.
Barry Arrington is back with this observation:
I guess that settles it. Barry wins the internet.
Actually I used it because Dembski used it in 2001 on page 251 of No Free Lunch in the passage where he describes what quantities can be used in “biological specification”.
I think it refers to people taking their winnings and getting cash for them, and then leaving the activity, such as a card game.
Maybe we’re all in it for the money. In which case we’re clearly crazy.
And would it arrange itself in a nested heirarch? Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Denyse frequents the “Official” ID Facebook page quite often. I’ll remind her of her invitation.
Why is it irrelevant? Why can the gene sequences we see in life not been created by a process of variations in frequencies of allele genes?
I see that our new Creationist chum has gone on about “complexity” in DNA. That’s all well and good, but I (being the thoroughly cynical and unsympathetic soul that I am) think our new Creationist chum doesn’t actually understand what the heck “complexity” is, nor can he tell what makes one particular string of nucleotides more “complex” than another, nor can he even measure the degree of “complexity” in an arbitrary nucleotide sequence. In point of fact, I think that our new Creationist chum is using the word “complexity” as if it were a magical spell that will surely defeat the hated demon Darwinism, as opposed to, like, using the word “complexity” to refer to a well-defined concept that actually does point out a genuine flaw in evolution.
Of course, I could be wrong about brucefast. It’s possible. So here, brucefast, is an opportunity for you to demonstrate that you actually know what the friggin’ heck you’re talking about when you emit verbiage about “complexity” and DNA. Here’s an arbitrary Sequence X, of 150 nucleotides:
Sequence X: gcc tac agg gat cgt ggg gac ctt acg aat ggc ctt ttt gac tat tct tcg aat cta agc tca gca tca ttc ccg tct acg gga agt ccc ttc cca ata cat atc ctc ggc acc gca ctt gca ggc tca cgc ttc gcg tca ttt agg tca
And here is Sequence X’, which was generated by deleting one nucleotide from Sequence X:
Sequence X’: gcc tac agg gac gtg ggg acc tta cga atg gcc ttt ttg act att ctt cga atc taa gct cag cat cat tcc cgt cta cgg gaa gtc cct tcc caa tac ata tcc tcg gca ccg cac ttg cag gct cac gct tcg cgt cat tta ggt ca
Please tell us all which of the two sequences, Sequence X or Sequence X’, has more “complexity” in it. And please don’t forget to show your work, brucefast.
Interesting.
There is that financial meaning, but philosophers use it to mean “analysed in detail” or something like that.
This article claims it was first used that way by Sellars.
I don’t know about “crazy”, but you certainly are extraordinarily patient with your ID interlocutors.
That is interesting. I was familiar with Joe’s translation of the expression, but I didn’t know it had a specialised meaning in philosophy. I guess this is how Dembski uses it:
The Wagner book discusses where the alleles come from in the first place. Or more specifically, why it is possible to have alleles. Once you have them, change in frequency in a population is just mathematics.
I think evolutionary biology is off in a new direction for the new century. We can now explore variation in the lab and confirm that variations are connected by small steps. This has always been assumed, but it is now possible to test it in the lab.
That’s funny. Kind of like mathematicians being upset when farmers talk about “fields”.
I remember you liking the Southern Reach trilogy; there is a recent article by its author about how he wrote it in Atlantic.
Extended mind in Clark’s sense also seems reasonable to me, possibly as a a perspective on long-arm functionalism.
My latest and last little exchange at UD (as Learned Hand) got me thinking about the nature of these arguments, and encouraged me to finally blog a piece of my ever-in-progress book:
I haven’t finished the SR trilogy–would it spoil things if I read VanderMeer’s article in The Atlantic?
“News” now asks, Philosopher Thomas Nagel thinks it is okay to discuss design in nature even in school?. Indeed, “News” — in an article he published in 2008 (see here for PDF). Apparently “News” didn’t see the point in remarking upon the fact that Nagel’s article is seven years old (or that it is available for free).
On a separate note: one frequently sees the claim at Uncommon Descent that naturalism is inconsistent with, or cannot account for, the thought that our cognitive capacities are generally reliable. We’ve kicked this around a few times here. Is this worth reviving in a separate thread?
Hmmmm–my posts aren’t appearing. Did I break something changing my handle?
Kantian Naturalist,
Maybe not, but anyway …
What I don’t get about that argument is that given naturalism, both my senses and creationists’ senses are unreliable, of course. But they seem to act as if their senses are known-to-be-reliable. Why do they get an exemption from that unreliability?
Also, if Nagel’s argument is that one’s inferences could not then be trusted, is he allowing for the fact that we interact and thus check each other’s conclusions? For example, by arguing. Anyone staring at the world can see that the Earth is generally flat. It is only by interacting with others (including educators) that we get talked out of that.
“Apparently “News” didn’t see the point in remarking upon the fact that Nagel’s article is seven years old (or that it is available for free).”
She has been doing this a lot lately. It must be hard to find recent papers that support ID.
In the New Testament there’s a load of “through a glass darkly” stuff to the effect that our perceptions are gravely flawed.
The whole point of scientific instrumentation is to extend and refine our senses.
And for those whose senses or reason are defectice, there’s the Darwin Award.
It seems, to my simplistically naturalistic mind, that organisms whose cognitive capacities were flawed would tend to leave fewer offspring, assuming variation in the ability.
As a bloke named Quine once said, “creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind”.
Allan Miller and cubist,
You’re right, of course.
I just wonder why Nagel demands total accuracy of his neurons, and apparently expects it, and I wonder whether he really thinks that only naturalists’ neurons are fallible, and whether he ignores the improvement of his conclusions that comes from other people arguing with them.
A minor point — the “naturalism is inconsistent with reliable cognition” thesis is not Nagel’s.
There’s a rough version of it in C. S. Lewis (actually, a really crude version in Descartes), and a more precise version in Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary argument against naturalism” (EAAN), which we’ve discussed here last year (?). Kairosofocus likes to quote Darwin and Haldane on this, and there are more sophisticated versions of this kind of anti-naturalism in Kant and Husserl.
Nagel’s point, in the recently-discovered (but actually several years old) article is that there are intellectual benefits to teaching intelligent design in public schools, even though intelligent design is not a scientific theory.
Oops, you’re right — I got Nagel mixed up with Plantinga. There’s really little similarity between them other than that they both don’t like naturalism.
Must be my fallible neurons.
Reliable isn’t what creationists are looking for.
What they what is self-evident TRVTH.
Yes, they are obsessed with what Dewey called “the Quest for Certainty” and what Sellars called “the Myth of the Given”.
And they continually repeat (in a somewhat crude form) the basic conclusion of Plantinga’s argument, apparently unaware of the glaring errors he commits. One thing I just realized the other day is that Plantinga (and O’Leary) quite badly misunderstand Pat Churchland’s quip that natural selection that “truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost”. Plantinga takes this to mean that natural selection only “cares” about fitness, and not about truth. But any intellectually honest reading of Churchland’s essay (“Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience”) reveals that what she’s really saying that we can only understand what truth is once we first understand how organisms process information about their environments. Truth must be biologized — re-conceived in neurological, ecological, and evolutionary terms — in order for us to understand what truth is.
Churchland might be wrong about that. (Though I do not think she is.) But Plantinga misunderstands her quite badly — so badly that I have grave doubts about his commitment to intellectual honesty. (My doubts were greatly increased by his absurd review of Philip Kitcher’s Life After Faith.) And the affection that the Uncommon Descent crowd have for Plantinga does nothing to bolster my confidence in their commitment to intellectual honesty, either.
Cubist:
That was the fate of the gavagai, for sure.
Especially since “gavagai” really meant, “rabid animal, run away.”
The greatest problem in their wanting infallibility is in how sterile they are in results, while the realization of fallibility has been extremely productive. Optical illusions provide insight into visual processing, and evolution plus social psychology does a rather good job of explaining why many people prefer a social “truth” like ID over an open-minded empiricism applied to biology.
Of course it’s nice to “right,” but it’s actually possible to be (mostly) right while still being able to learn and to question previous assumptions. Infallibility is just a way of closing off oneself, via a set of logical presuppositions, to recognizing both the limits and the possibilities of our rather fallible brains.
Glen Davidson
That is, if ‘we’ and the truths ‘we’ are interested in are no ‘higher’ than or ‘more’ than just a sum of what our biological parts can aid us to ‘re-conceive’.
Biologised ‘Philosopher’s Bloat’ is another way to describe what KN wrote.
Gregory,
Gregory,
If you disagree with KN, make a case while remaining within the not-very-onerous rules.
Timaeus @UD
C’mon, you thickies, up your game! 😉