Recent posts by Sal remind me that there are some intelligent educated people who doubt Common Descent. What I don’t understand what they think the alternative is. Put simply I take Common Descent as the position that :
* At one time there was only very simple unicellular life on earth (this is not a debate about how that unicellular life originated)
* Complex life forms (eukaryotes) are created by slight modifications from other life forms (which are their parents). We have never observed them being created any other way!
* All complex life forms are the descended from a very small number of simple life forms – quite possibly just one.
The alternatives I can imagine are:
* Complex life descended many different times from simple life forms – so e.g. mammals descended from a different simple life form from fish. This flies in the face of the fossil record and the hierarchical nature of complex life but I can sort of understand it.
* Complex life from time to time gives birth to wholly different species – massively implausible.
* Complex life is created anew by some process never imagined or observed – even more implausible but presumably what Young Earth creationists believe.
But maybe there is another option?
If Sal or someone could explain I would be interested.
There’s the puff-of-smoke hypothesis of ID.
http://evolutionwiki.org/wiki/Puff_of_Smoke
Heh, though Michael Behe accepts common descent, so it doesn’t seem that he thinks every organism (or the ancestors of certain clades or families/whatever) were magickd into existence ex nihilo.
I think it’s pretty obvious that those who reject common descent also largely reject any kind of naturalistic evolution (or other natural mechanisms of origin). That leaves independent creation as the only option left.
So they believe in magic.
*Poof* – the ancestor of all Bovines.
*Poof* – the ancestor of all sharks.
etc.
The interesting thing is that if they actually reject common descent, they must reject Stephen Meyers new book “Darwin’s doubt” too, since, while this book of course postulates that almost all of life somehow originated in the cambrian explosion, it was mostly achieved through the guided evolution of the creator-god who forced and then picked the right mutations into existence that would achieve the diversit of life. Consequently all life is still related, it’s just that their mechanism of evolution and the time it took it all to speciate and diversify over the planet was achived in the beginning of the cambrian, in less than 30 million years, through the guidance of god.
So I guess the common-descent rejecters also reject “Darwin’s Doubt” and similar ideas from Michael Behe.
The term ‘Common Design’ has been offered as an alternative (http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/common-descent-or-common-design-is-there-a-difference/). Of course, the ‘strictly scientific’ proof of that is still (and always will be) in question. But once/if one involves science, philosophy *and* theology/worldview in a cooperative dialogue, the notion of ‘Common Design’ (even as a non-IDist theory) has just as much explanatory power as ‘Common Descent/Ascent’. Both notions are compatible with how ‘complex life’ arose/emerged/evolved/was created involving natural science/philosophy/theology.
Are you aware, Mark Frank, of Paul Nelson’s long-overdue book on ‘Common Descent’? The DI Wedge Document even referred to it: “Nelson’s book, On Common Descent, is the seventeenth book in the prestigious University of Chicago “Evolutionary Monographs” series and the first to critique neo-Darwinism.” Or see here more recently: http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Welcome-Paul-Nelson
Nelson is one of the few or perhaps even the only ‘young earth creationist’ among the IDM leadership. But he is a close ‘comrade’ (their term, said with Marxist envy) of Dembski’s and Meyer’s. Were you aware of the connection between the blog ‘Uncommon Descent’ and Nelson’s book?
Nelson’s a decent guy with a sense of humour. I’ve met him. But he tars the IDM (while also bringing it ironic cred with YECs) with his ‘philosophy of biology’ in the framework of ‘thousands, not millions of years.’
I am sure that is true. A large number of ID proponents are committed to Common Descent including Dembski and Behe. I guess it is a sort of loyalty that stops this disagreement emerging too often. In some ways the divide over Common Descent is much bigger than the divide over Design. If you accept Common Descent, but believe the mutations were guided, then that is compatible with most of science. If you reject Common Descent, then I think you have to throw out vast tracts of Biology, Geology, Cosmology, Physics etc. But then I am not sure what those who reject Common Descent are proposing – so I may be wrong.
It’s written out in a freely available, best-selling book. As far as they are concerned, the rest is mere details.
Mark,
Boltzmann species. 🙂
(For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, see Boltzmann brain.)
Common Design does not have any explanatory power. If every base were functional, and every positional juxtaposition essential, then it might be less ridiculous, but that is not the case. As it is, it can explain nothing because it could explain everything. The Designer wanted it that way, for reasons unknown – it just happens to follow the pattern expected from a descent relationship, not only in functional sequence, but in just about every silent substitution, dead transposon or piece of fluff.
Your close genetic identity to your parents is down to descent. Where does this commonality through inheritance stop and Common Design take over, when we get exactly the same pattern at higher taxonomic levels, with a bit less similarity and a bit more difference?
Its simple.
Its so gloriously complex it could only be created by a creator.
Then it follows this would be done in categories of order. The god of physics is the God of biology.
From these original kinds then there was a disorder and chaos that brought diversity.
The bible says this too.
There has been no observation of primitive to complex in biology.
In fact the past is hidden.
Fossils do not tell anything but about the creature in fossil.
It is only concepts of geology that are invoked to draw connections between fossils.
Yet no biology is done to show these connections.
In fact its hard to disprove a line of reasoning.
Gregory,
Common design might explain the hierarchical nature of life but it doesn’t give an account of how the different “kinds” physically first appeared. Do those who deny common descent follow the “poof” and there it was view? Do I need to read a whole book to find out?
Robert as you clearly deny common descent and appear to be following perhaps you can explain? Did the first complex animals just appear overnight – assembled by God from their raw components including all that is needed to sustain them (parents for young ones, prey for predators, pollinators for flowers etc). Or did they descend from something simpler?
Gregory,
Common design explains cars with completely novel features originally developed without cars in mind (radios, computers), it does not explain the extremely derivative features of life.
Why don’t bats fly with feathers, the only biologic material that makes for extremely well-contoured aerodynamic shapes? With evolution, we know–bats are mammals, and feathers were essentially evolutionarily ruled out in mammals by the time bats arose. A common designer could readily stick feathers on bats, while evolution (virtually) cannot.
Why the hierarchies of life, if common design were the cause? Even more so, why do organisms that swap genes horizontally “just happen” to have both microevolutionary and macroevolutionary gene taxonomies that reflect just that, while only organisms largely lacking in lateral gene transfers actually show the good “genealogical” patterns of genes that would be expected from vertical transmission of genes?
Common design would never be so derivative as we see in life, nor is there any reason to expect it to produce the evolutionarily-expected differences in derivation that are found in (roughly) prokaryotes vs. eukaryotes. Unless, say, common design were being done by genetic algorithm, which is not far from the truth.
Glen Davidson
Are you aware, gregory, that
1. Evolutionary Monographs was a monograph series created by Leigh Van Valen.
2. While an important evolutionary biologist, Van Valen was also a considerable oddball.
3. Van Valen died a few years ago.
4. I am not aware that his monograph series has been picked up by anyone, so it is most likely defunct. I am not sure there is any publisher distributing any of the previous monographs in that series.
5. I believe that it is not a publication of the University of Chicago Press, and is not formally supported by the University of Chicago. That was Van Valen’s university, and that is the only sense in which the monograph series was
Thus Nelson’s long-awaited monograph is going to be awaited even longer. Whether Nelsen submitted it to Van Valen, who insisted on changes, or whether Nelson never submitted the monograph, I do not know. And what arguments it might have used no one knows.
There is not a scrap, even in the bible, to support your suppositions about the effect of the fall on the natural world. Are you really saying that organismal diversity arose from someone eating a fruit?
‘Common Design’ has explanatory power in the same sense that Noah’s Flood explains the geological record. Superficially it seems to explain, but when you scratch the surface absurdites start to pile up. Of course the patterns of nested hierarchies of arbitrary traits…and all the other evidence for common descent can always be explained away with “thats just how the designer did it”. So does that explain away the absurdities? I’d like to see a rigorous philosophical analysis of how to properly weigh and interpret evidence in this case and why ‘common design’ fails. The common attack “an intelligent designer explains everything and therefore explains nothing” is reasonable but I think there is a far more compelling argument out there.
RodW,
Another way to put it is that one cannot derive any knowledge–predictions–from ID. There is no legitimate premise from which to build any sort of logic of “intelligent design,” hence you cannot say that “if a designer exists, the hierarchical patterns, and oddities like ‘vestigial organs,’ will be seen.” That is how we test a theory like evolution, it has premises that lead to telling conclusions, and because evolution passes these tests it succeeds as a theory.
They try to fake it, by claiming that “if life is designed, then life will be functionally complex.” But it is a given that life is complex (very simple life could no longer exist–it would be eaten, at the least), and it is often rather more complex than need be because it is evolutionarily derived. Think of the bones of bird wings fusing from what were many articulated bones in terrestrial dinosaurs. Once again, that complexity, like all of life’s complexity, fits with the premises of evolution, and not with any legitimate design premises.
Philosophically it’s never very simple, because induction isn’t simple, unlike some strict logic is, like syllogisms. The simplest way to say it is that modern ID (unlike some falsifiable–and false–forms of ID) has no legitimate entailments. Evolution entails the hierarchies where horizontal gene transfer is rare to non-existent, it entails the extremely derivative nature of life that we see, and it entails the existence of functionally needless complexity in some cases, such as we find in the bone structure of bird wings. Design entails none of these, hence it is untestable–unfalsifiable in the Popperian sense (only a rule of thumb, IMO, but a pretty good one for science theories).
Glen Davidson
The “Common design” retort is a ridiculous proposition when given a little thought. It might do well as a tool for handwavy dismissal, but once you submit it to even the slightest of critical evaluation it instantly collapses like a house of cards.
Allow me a small elaboration I’ve used before. This will be an attempt to portray the train of thought of the “designer” of the nested hierarchies into which the genomes and anatomical features of extant life fits using the “common design-common designer” ad-hoc rationalization.
Here goes:
I wonder what the odds of me creating and designing life, exactly using this method is? I wonder if it even makes sense to postulate that anything would do “design” like this? Hmmm.
Does this make sense to postulate? No, it doesn’t. No sensible intelligent designer would operate like this and produce a nested hierarchy indistinguishable from the one produced by an evolutionary process.
I submit that if you can convince yourself that your designer operated like this, then you’re either insane, deluded or infinitely gullible. Regardless, it would be irrational to believe it.
Hold on you say! We mustn’t anthropomorphize the designer, it works in mysterious ways, has plans we cannot fathom and is unlimited in creativity and power. Can that idea be tested? Does it make testable predictions? Nope.
Can ID then be said to be science? Nope.
Given the way ID proponents think about their designer, (mysterious, unknowable, omnipotent, non-anthropomorphic), they’re terminally unable to produce a scientific hypothesis of ID. In the few rare cases where they even bother on specifics, it’s either still unfalsifiable (magic instant creation of molecular structures (like flagella) or instantiating mutations in the deep geological past) – or beaten by a simpler, more parsimonious evolutionary explanation that doesn’t postulate unobserved entities or new forces of nature.
In this respect ID is particularly ridiculous, since it postulates one of the most unparsimonious ideas ever: An incorporeal, immortal mind having persisted for billions of years with the ability to reach into the material realm and create and manipulate matter inside living organisms everywhere on the surface of an entire planet simultaneously.
In other words, an unobserved designer that doesn’t in any way fit with our current understanding of physics, operating in the deep geological past, on a global scale, who has the ability to make specific mutations happen and instantiate from nothing entire elaborate molecular structures inside living organisms, is in competition with the observed fact that evolution happens in the here and now:
* Mutations observationally happen, and we have good reason to think they would in the past too.
* Drift and selection observationally happens, and we have good reason to think they would in the past too.
* Incomplete lineage sorting observationally happens, and we have good reason to think it would in the past too.
* Horizontal gene transfer observationally happens, and we have good reason to think it would in the past too.
* Convergent evolution observationally happens, and we have good reason to think it would in the past too.
* Environments observationally change, and we have good reason to think they would in the past too.
Which is the simplest, most parsimonious explanation then? The observed one that doesn’t require us to erect uneconomical unobserved entities: Evolution.
Rumraket,
That’s exactly the point of this OP:
Things That IDers Don’t Understand, Part 1 — Intelligent Design is not compatible with the evidence for common descent
Common design, with or without common descent, is an extremely poor fit to the evidence. The objective nested hierarchy is a one-in-trillions pattern, and there is no reason to expect a designer to conform to it.
Unguided evolution is a superior hypothesis, hands down.
The difficulty with Common Design is that its proponents refuse to speculate (for the purposes of the argument) on any limitations on the powers of the Designer, or on what her objectives might be.
(That is, until we start discussing junk DNA, when they become very very certain that she would not deisgn any such thing — but let that pass).
Thus a Designer could produce any pattern whatsoever.
If we have a human designer we usually know much about the designer’s limits and intentions, and can make actual predictions. A designer of fast racing cars will not produce a tricycle for that purpose.
So Common Design produces no predictions and thus is not a scientific theory.
“Common Design produces no predictions and thus is not a scientific theory.”
Yeah, that’s the key point. ‘Common Design’ cannot be *only* a ‘scientific theory.’ It must be more than that, just like reflexive human thought is supra-scientific. The notion of ‘Common Design’ is an interdisciplinary view that necessarily combines science, philosophy and theology/worldview.
Let’s be clear, folks, I am not an IDist. I reject the IDM’s ‘strictly scientific’ claims for Common Design as deceptively inaccurate.
The big question for people here (who self-identify as ‘skeptics’) is whether or not ‘Common Descent’ is a ‘strictly [natural] scientific’ theory too. If it is, then involving philosophy and theology/worldview are banned on this topic at the start. What’s your choice: allow them in this conversation or not?
Mark Frank wrote: “Common design might explain the hierarchical nature of life but it doesn’t give an account of how the different “kinds” physically first appeared.”
How “might they explain the hierarchical natural of life,” Mark? Please be as specific as possible.
In regard to ‘first appearances,’ the frontrunning theorists here should really declare their philosophy and theology/worldview more openly, instead of pretending ‘strictly scientific’ on one of the most speculative topics there is. Evolutionary theory of ‘common descent’ is no better on this ‘first appearances’ question than ‘Common Design.’ That is, the strongest position leaves the door open for both.
As one of the founders of the modern evolutionary synthesis (neo-Darwinian evolution) said: “Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.” – Theodosius Dobzhansky
‘Common Descent,’ as Mark Frank inquires, is not a theory of origins. It requires entities/organisms to already exist before ‘descent’ (or ascent, or as KN/E calls it, ’emergence’) can occur. That’s why an interdisciplinary view that combines science, philosophy and theology/worldview makes the most sense on this topic, even if naturalism and scientism have made it hard for people in a scientific/technological epoch to speak openly and clearly of the continuing importance of philosophy and theology/worldview on their OoL speculations.
I’m sure that I don’t fit that “frontrunning” part. But I’ll give my position anyway, at risk of criticism.
As best I can tell, “common descent” (as in the theory of evolution) and “common design with an evolving design plan” would make fairly similar predictions. I doubt that there is enough evidence to distinguish between them.
I don’t think of common descent as a theory. I think of it as a tentative observation, adequately confirmed for some species but still tentative as an overall account. I do find common descent far more plausible than common design with an evolving design plan, but assessments of plausibility can be wrong.
I’m not a Darwinist, as I think I have previously mentioned. Yes, natural selection (or differential survival) occurs. But I see evolutionary change as being driven by the response of biological systems to that differential survival, rather than being driven by natural selection. An evolving population is a learning system, so can be seen as intelligent if you take “intelligence” to mean something like learning capability.
Not leading and not a theorist. Any more than I am a theorist on cosmology, physics, geology or any other science.
I have been watching the online debate for 15 years, patiently waiting for some evolution critic to say something not derivative of Paley. So far no luck.
I first encountered the concept of evolution in 1956 and have followed the debate ever since.
Scientific theories assume methodological naturalism. It is true that an unseen being or beings could hold every molecule together, push every moving part, make creatures move like puppets, hold every arrow and guide it along a parabola, cause radioactive decay etc etc, but the scientific model(s) we have of the world make such non-explanations redundant.
Sure, theology can cling onto the coat-tails of science and say in retrospect “God/Zeus/Odin/Vishnu and his colleagues meant to do it that way”, but the less gullible will be completely unimpressed by the complete failure to have foreseen any of this before scientists made the observations and discovered theories. Theories which not only provide natural mechanisms but are, unlike theology, also predictive.
Thus the introduction of theology into the conversation is completely vacuous.
Rumraket has explained how “common design” is ridiculous: the designer has made it look exactly as if evolution occurred. Sure, God could be deceptive, or you could blame it all on Satan, but such interjections are feeble, predicting nothing, explaining nothing. The religious insist on the ad hoc, but meanwhile science moves on apace.
How does change as the response of biological systems to natural selection work?
The population carries as much variation as it can bear. This allows it to explore other parts of the fitness landscape. Natural selection is, in effect, a narrowing of the part of the fitness landscape used by the population. If they can counter this by expanding into other parts of the landscape, the population (or a successor population) is more likely to survive. And if a part of the population is successful in its region of the fitness landscape, rapid expansion (a spurt of reproduction) from that part of the population helps it become established there.
Neil,
What is non-Darwinian about exploiting new ecological niches?
Neil Rickert,
I find your formulation slightly strange. Natural Selection is, as you have noted, differential reproduction. A ‘spurt of reproduction’, if causally linked to the better ability of that type to exploit the niche than rivals, is natural selection in a nutshell. So while you may not consider yourself a Darwinist (in the biological sense), if you are invoking trait-dependent differential reproduction to drive population-level change (the ultimate origin of that variation being the individual-level processes of mutation and recombination), you kind of are! 🙂 Natural Selection is the reason there is a fitness landscape (instead of a plane), not a narrowing of it.
I’m a bit puzzled by your turn of phrase, Neil. Managing to have more or less offspring as a result of how well-adapted an organism is in comparison to its other members of the gene-pool is not really a positive response. It is more like a passive result. This is most easily illustrated with plants. A plant does not move, has no sensory inputs, has no choices but will grow if it can. A clear space of ground will soon be recolonised by those plants that can grow there. It’s the environment that is doing the designing.
What do you mean by the “fitness landscape used by the population.”? This active phrasing makes no sense to me.
As for NS “narrowing the fitness landscape”, you are using neo-Darwinian language to try to hint at something non-Darwinian. I have no idea what is intended. Fitness is defined in terms of differential survival.
I think there’s a bit of unintentional equivocation here.
Fitness landscape could mean the objective chemical properties of molecules, or the properties of coding sequences in the context of translation, or the effect on reproductive success in the context of the current ecosystem.
I see these contexts being intermingled all the time.
The eating was a rebellion that led to death for creation.
therefore creation morphed instantly for the new reality.
This is what the bible teaches.
Before the fall there was no need for a immune system or any protection from anything.
A common blueprint is behind all biology and a common blueprint for dealing with the new reality of death.
The creatures god created were in full complexity as today. tHere is no simple to complex story. All creatures are in fact complex. The idea of less complex is unrelated to biology. Its just a judgement call.
There was a fall and a new creation as such that distorted biology.
There is no biological evidence for these ideas of descent of complex/not complex creatures.
its all just looking as biological data points(fossils) and drawing conclusions based on trust in geological conclusions of deposition of the fossils in time.
Without the geology there is no biological change in the creatures. Rather they are just cousins down the street living at the same time.
There is no biological evidence behind the use of fossils for biological conclusions.
There is no biological study. its just a study of pictures in stones.
Therefore its not a scientific investigation of biological processes. To be scientific it musy only employ the study of the subject opined on.
Robert Byers,
No it isn’t. There is not a word about the immune system and disease, or predator-prey interactions, or creation ‘morphing’. He had some harsh words for the serpent and the woman, invented the pain of childbirth and death (what a thoroughly decent chap!), booted them out of Eden and obliged Adam to take up farming.
That’s it. The rest, you made up.
Stated that way, probably nothing. It’s just that the Darwinian account, as I see it, puts too much emphasis on natural selection, and treats mutations as accidents. I’d prefer to see mutations considered part of how a population behaves – teleonomic action if you like.
I disagree. Yes, it is something Darwin discussed with his reference to Malthus. But it is not strictly a matter of selection.
Here’s an analogy. We can use a cookie cutter to shape the dough into fancy shapes for cookies. The cookie cutter is a filter that does some shaping, so is like natural selection. But it is the cook pumping the dough through the cookie cutter that makes it all work.
Maybe you don’t see that as an important point. But this is one of things that confuses people and leads them to believe that evolution could not work.
So Fodor finds no basis for intentionality in natural selection. He’s right. The basis is instead to be found, at least partly, in this “pumping of cookie dough through the cookie cutter” or the biological drive to reproduce whenever conditions allow. It is also to be found in adaptive feedback of the homeostatic processes that control development.
I am not trying to change the science — I’m not a biologist. I would like to see a change in the way that the science is presented. It is usually described in a way that persuades many people that evolution is impossible. You need to re-describe it in a way that persuades people (particularly non-biologists) that evolution is virtually certain.
I probably should have worded that “the portion of the environment exploited by the population.”
Neil Rickert,
It is, though – at least, that’s how Darwin explicitly coined the term. Your objection, through Fodor, sounds like a common Creationist equivocation: ‘no-one is doing the selecting’. Darwin started from the breeding process, where an agent decides who gets to pass their genes on. He then went on to Natural Selection, where the environment ‘decides’. In both cases, the gene pool is enriched in the qualities selective agents favour, and impoverished in those the selective agent acts against. The choice of the word ‘selection’ may have too active a connotation for you, but that is what Darwin used it for: enrichment/impoverishment according to effect upon variants.
You need to re-describe it in a way that persuades people (particularly non-biologists) that evolution is virtually certain.
As far as persuading people that it is virtually certain, I would not start with selection at all, but with the null – where there is no selection in effect at all, there is still evolution, provided nonlethal mutations occur. This derives entirely from sample error: iterative generational sampling leads to inexorable change and ultimate fixation of one variant from any starting pool. Since new variants are being continually being fed into that process, such a population cannot help but change.
Then one builds selection upon that background – it rumples the plane that a nonselective landscape would describe in ‘fitness space’, and populations track those (dynamic, or at least metastable) rises and falls. Selection is less like a single cookie-cutter; more like two competing investments offering different variable rates of interest. That offering the higher average rate will be more likely to come to form the bulk of my capital. If I cream off the proceeds indiscriminately (nonselective death in a finite world), eventually one investment will have no capital to compound. This happens regardless of the differential in rate of return, but when there is a differential, the process is more likely both to favour the higher, and be quicker about it.
When arguing online I try to say differential reproductive success rather than selection.
That is neutral with respect to the effects of variation.
keiths:
Neil:
Well, mutation is the source of novelty, and selection only winnows it down, as any ‘Darwinist’ will tell you. Here’s Jacques Monod:
Blind to consequences, but not necessarily entirely “random.”
The point at which science differs from ID is on the question of foresight.
Allan,
I would argue that selection is still taking place when lethal mutations are removed from the population. This is especially clear if you take the ‘selfish gene’ view and see the organism itself as part of the gene’s environment. The mutant gene, in the context of its organismal environment, fails to get itself passed on to the next generation, so it is selected out of the population.
The true null would be the case where all mutants survive.
I descended from my mother and father.
My brothers descended from my mother and father.
My sisters descended from my mother and father.
Why on earth do people here at TSZ claim that ID proponents deny common descent?
Because you deny all the interesting common descent.
“For the sake of argument, I’ll often allow that common descent may be true, even though I personally reject it.”
William Dembski
Heh, so independent creation it is. God poofed entire populations of organisms into existence intermittently over a 4 billion year timeperiod. In temporal order so it looks like they evolved.
It seems poor Demski hasn’t thought this one through.
Yes, I guess my sentence could have been better constructed. “where there is no selection in effect at all, there is still evolution, provided nonlethal mutations occur.”
If a mutation does not even get into the population – cannot reside in a living individual – this is of course selection: strong purifying selection. But a population cannot evolve due to strong purifying selection, hence my ‘null’ for heritable genetic change, in lineage or population, demands that a mutation at least gets out of the starting gate.
Why don’t you go and ask over at *UncommonDescent* if they support or deny common descent?
Sheesh.
Because many do! The problem is there is no common view about anything ID at Uncommon Descent (seemingly the only venue left where such things could be discussed). Look at the proliferation of acronyms sprouting out of Dembki’s “CSI”!
Mung,
First off, no one’s saying that all IDists deny common descent.
But since no designer has ever, ever, been known to design anything like life, or to make results indistinguishable from what unintelligent evolutionary processes produce, the mere acknowledgement of common descent means very little.
In the scientific sense, design is very easy to distinguish from biological evolution, for design transcends the limits of the latter. Accepting that the limits of “natural” evolutionary processes found in organisms point to evolution while simultaneously claiming that design processes that transcend those limits are operating within evolution is senseless. To expect design to appear designed (and not accepting ID attempts to redefine evolutionary expectations as design) is reasonable.
Glen Davidson
Mark,
Sorry I missed this post. If one rejects the hypothesis of creator, one would generally accept common descent except for 2 cases:
1. convergence whereby features are similar but can’t be due to common descent in principle (eye or wing evolution), Dawkins says eyes evolved 40 separate times independently, wings evolved at least 3 times (insects, bats, birds). etc.
2. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT)
In a sense, convergence and HGT are proximal (not universal) rejections of common descent for limited cases where there are identical features. This has relevance to the creation hypothesis.
There is a book by a non-creationist that rejects common descent universally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periannan_Senapathy
If one accepts the hypothesis of a creator, or if one for the sake of argument accepts the hypothesis of a creator, then the question is whether the creator created independent forms or if the creator used secondary means to create all living creatures through a common ancestor. That is how Darwin framed his argument. He said:
To be fair, not even creationists believed all species were independently created. Blyth did not think so. Creationists are interested in hybridization experiments to identify what are indeed the created kinds because many “species” may be all of one kind (i.e. lions, tigers, leopards, jagaurs).
Whenever an evolutionist accepts convergence (such as with eyes) or even in cases of HGT, then it would seem equally parsimonious to accept an independent creation if one believes in a Creator.
There are reasons human evolution from primates could be rejected on some logical grounds (assuming there is a creator):
1. reasons outlined in john Sanford’s work suggesting humanity cannot be that old in principle due to genetic deterioration
2. if we are substantially different from chimps
Other than that, I suppose the rejection is mostly theological, and hence not scientific.
But if one assumes there is no creator or statistical miracles, common descent would be relatively better than independent birth of organisms because of things like the universal DNA code (and similar machinery in each organism for transcription of DNA into proteins, possibly similar developmental mechanisms, etc.).
If I were an atheist, I would probably invoke statistical miracles because of the problem of transitionals happening even in principle and all the other considerations laid out in ID literature.
Some have speculated that organisms have similarity based on physical law. That is to say, a molecule of water looks like another molecule of water because physical law constrains the atoms to assemble in certain limited ways. Hence water molecules are a “platonic” form of sorts. The similarity is in water molecules is thus based on physical law but not common descent. We also see similarities in the elements of the periodic table.
Denton tried to make such an argument for the similarities in biology (that physics causes them), but I don’t think physics agrees with that route, so if I were an atheist, I would invoke a statistical miracle that is not repeatable.
Physics constrains the forms to be a certain way (otherwise they would not be functional), but that’s different than saying physics makes the biological forms inevitable or highly probable. Lewontin said there is nothing in terms of physics that constrains biology to the morphospace it occupies (why insects are constrained to have a certain number of wings, or why birds don’t eat leaves). I agree with Lewontin in that regard, and think Denton is wrong….
If I disbelieved in creator, I would invoke statistical miracles for the origin of life and probably leave the question of common descent unanswered, or at least leave them open for certain lineages like evolution of birds from fish.
Salvador, do you believe it is important to communicate consistently and clearly?
If so, then why do you sometimes capitalise ‘Creator’ and sometimes leave ‘creator’ un-capitalised? What difference do you imply by this, or was it simply a mistake in your communication?
You also say “hypothesis of creator” and “hypothesis of a creator”. What’s the difference you imply by adding or leaving out the article?
Of course, lots of ‘atheists’ believe in ‘creators’ (and in ‘creativity’). Bill Dembski might call them/us ‘mundane creators’ rather than ‘transcendent creators.’ But notice that he doesn’t capitalise ‘transcendent Creator’ in his ‘technical’ works, prefering to be objectivistic and unreflexive in order to appear religiously neutral.
The theists I am accustomed to usually capitalise ‘Creator’ to distinguish the sacred from the profane or the divine from the human. This distinguish (a) divine name(s) from common names. Perhaps you’ve decided that your particular ‘theory’ of ‘Intelligent Design/intelligent design’ doesn’t call for such language, which is why you write ‘creator’ when you likely mean ‘Creator’?
It almost seems lately that you are willing to accept Common Descent, but not common descent. Are you catching the difference in punctuation? Only the highly unorthodox/strange (at least communicatively) Byers is really against ‘common descent’ in this thread. But not you, right?
Or are you offering Common Design instead of Common Descent? Or perhaps some personal autonomous mixture of both?
Bully for you!
However, many of us would hold that there is no need to invoke “miracles” of any sort
As it happens, Patrick has just left an interesting post and link concerning OoL in the Sandbox.
Mark,
There are reasons one might reject creation, and they pretty much follow the line of reasoning I provided here for good and bad reasons for rejecting ID, with the exception of common descent:
Can we hypothesize a mechanism that is not repeatable or directly observable? We can, but it is arguably outside empirical science. It might be true, but it is not testable. That is the complication in claiming a Creator.
FWIW, even though it is speculative, and many physicists will disagree, the notion of a Creator is not formally excluded as a possibility from what we know of the natural world, even though it could be an unprovable hypothesis.
See:
So a possible mechanism (God) might be weakly predicted by physics, but it is not testable nor repeatable. Rather than framing the argument in terms of truth or falsehood, especially in light of uncertain knowledge, I found peace framing the argument in terms of payoff in a discussion you participated in here: