Upright Biped has announced the launch of his site via this UD post: Writing Biosemiosis-org
All of the unique physical conditions of dimensional semiosis have already been observed and documented in the scientific literature. It is an intractable fact that a dimensional semiotic system is used to encode organic polymers inside the cell. The conclusion of intelligent action is therefore fully supported by the physical evidence, and is subject to falsification only by showing an unguided source capable of creating such a system.
http://biosemiosis.org/index.php/a-scientific-hypothesis-of-design
Discuss!
Sure it is,keep going the way you are going. This place is nothing compared to UD for insults and name calling, the Greek chorus rejecting vjtorley’s request for civility. Classic.
Since which time you forgot all about “semiotic theory” in connection with Upright Biped?
I think he’d be hurt.
I have a question, why do design theorists never discuss what entailed in actually creating designs? Both in the abstract and concrete, to detect design it seems logical to know about design. Now that would be interesting.
I made a big donation. He’ll get over it.
I still have no idea what you mean by “Semiotic Theory.” Should I start another thread?
well newton, you have a point. I’ve been asking myself why I don’t speak up over at UD when I see the insults. I could look at all the abuse heaped on anyone who is a theist here at TSZ, and especially those who are Christians. I could say that my general silence here and my general practice of just skipping over the posts of habitual offenders here carries over and gives a pass to me when I do the same over at UD. I could point to the reduction of my own practice of slinging insults over there.
But yeah, I think I should do more. I should speak up more often.
Thank you.
Good question. And I agree. This is something Gregory brings up every so often and I don’t think I’ve disagreed with him about it. I’ve probably even requested that he start an OP.
As for me personally, I have a number of books on the subject, such as How Designers Think and What Designers Know.
That would be Nirvana.
Doesn’t that depend on whether God is endothermic or exothermic?
By all means, donate more money.
Answer:
It would mark the beginning of the end of the IDM if IDists based in the Discovery Institute (i.e. any of the DI’s Fellows) did this. Why? That would mean one really CAN study (lowercase) designers and designing processes. And by fiat, IDT doesn’t allow this. They are being dishonourable to good science and also to fellow theists who have seen through the ideology they are parading as ‘underdog’ expelled psycho-trauma.
The DI’s leadership is bent on suggestiveness and implicationism in their ‘mysterious’ probabilistic theory of origins.
So, newton, your question is mis-framed; you chose the wrong term. You ask about ‘design theorists’, which is oftentimes how the DI speaks of themselves. But that’s wrong. They are not ‘design theorists’ at all. They are (uppercase) ‘Intelligent Design theorists,’ and almost entirely offer no ‘theory’ of how, where, when or even who did the ‘Designing.’ If you ask actual ‘design theorists,’ almost none of whom are IDists, you’d find a wealth of discourse to challenge and likely intrigue you. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff going on nowadays in actual ‘design theory,’ not the fake apologetics the DI peddles (right Mung?).
Mung may “have a number of books on the subject.” But that’s not IDism, and Mung knows this. Still trying to pull the wool over peoples’ eyes, Mung, or finally willing to come clean?
I’ve met many actual ‘design theorists,’ as have likely others here. They are quite frankly nothing like the (DeSiGn reVoLuTioN baby!!) culture warriors at the DI. Sorry, Mung, but you’ve bought and sold in with the wrong crowd, under management that intentionally distorts reality in their quest to ‘renew America’ religiously. Protestant proactive PR-heavy IDism in church channels isn’t exactly a sign of virtue or a symbol of good science, philosophy or theology/worldview!
Fancy sounding gibberish that I wouldn’t pay $18 for when I can get the condescending masterpieces of Kairos Focus for free. 🙂
Mung,
More than She can lift. (I’d never say that to Her face, though.)
Patrick,
She heard that!
Out of interest, in those books do they talk about design as we see “design” in the genome? E.G. multiple levels of interaction across many layers where changing one thing in one layer may have many unpredictable consequences?
If not, why are they relevant?
Do you recall my design is the inverse of cognition thread? That is what my tool/game is about.
I think what happens when we create designs is that we begin with a pattern/form that exists in our minds and then attempt to exemplify it in a physical medium. The resulting physical artifact approximates but does not exactly match the pattern/form existing in our minds.
When we infer design in an object what we are doing is looking past the random noise present in anything physical and recognizing the immaterial form/pattern that underlies it.
That is the idea anyway.
When viewed this way ID is really about a sort of communication between the designer and the observer of those designs.
peace
Any books on designing genomes? Principles of genetic coding?
Oh, my sides hurt from laughing.
Well go ahead, fifth. Give us a worked out example of having a biological form in mind, and then mapping it to a genome. I’m holding my breath.
The “form” is the ideal phenotype of a particular species or individual organism. worked out examples are everywhere around you.
feel free to exhale
peace
Feel free to demonstrate that you can go from form to genome.
Demonstrate that design is possible.
Show your working!
Simple example. If I ask an architect to represent a wall, he might draw a straight line. If I asked to include more detail, he might include an indicator of scale, and perhaps other attributes.
All I’m asking IDist to do is show how a biological feature is represented in genetic code.
Draw me a line in genetic code, and indicate the attributes.
Check it out, Hot off the presses
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/gene-editing-cut-and-paste-the-genetic-code/
peace
check it out, Hot off the presses this very morning
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/gene-editing-cut-and-paste-the-genetic-code/
I think I understand ID now. Copy and paste is writing.
That really explains a lot.
Yes, When we write all we are doing is combining preexisting words and clauses into new and novel arrangements to suit our needs .
Do you disagree?
peace
I suspect the problem with ID is exemplified in Dembski’s obsession with Logos.
IDists live in Harry Potter World. Speak the correct word, the correct incantation, and stuff appears. “Almost like magic.”
No mucking about with the dirty details of assembly. No trial and error, no incremental change or advancement. You just want something, and Poof.
Once you know the code and how to manipulate it. It is pretty much as simple as cut and paste to get what you want
That is pretty much the point of the article is it not?
peace
If that’s all there is to design, then you will have no trouble showing me how to design a completely novel gene, or a completely novel regulatory network.
Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you that a mishmash of pre-existing symbols is not
Shakespeare. Your little not-design-detector certainly can’t distinguish rubble from Shakespeare.
Are you really that effing stupid?
You really don’t understand how mind-freaking stupid that is?
Shakespere had a form/pattern in his mind and used pre-existing symbols to actualize it in a physical medium
do you disagree?
My hypothesis is that we can tell the difference. We will see
peace
Yes, as a matter of fact, I think that way of describing creative writing is rubbish.
Well feel free to present an alternative description and defend it
I’m holding my breath 😉
peace
But human languages do have words, grammar and syntax.
Getting back to biology, we might agree that the genetic code can be thought of as a sequence of letters, and the letters can be translated into molecules having something close to a one to one correspondence.
Now show me how to arrange a sequence of letters to form the equivalent of a word or a sentence. Show me the rules by which phrases in genetic code become phenotypes. Show me how to tell if a genetic utterance is grammatical or not.
Except he didn’t. He invented them.
http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm
Unless of course you merely mean “the letters of the alphabet”. In which case you are beyond the bounds of this discussion.
If the contents of the genome were designed, is this what you would expect to see? Are you close to making a prediction here?
We are at the early stages of our knowledge of the code. It’s like we have a wealth of hieroglyphics and a newly discovered Rosetta stone. The hard work of translation is just beginning
A big part of what is going on in genomics is understanding the grammar and syntax and the like. Science marches on
peace
That needs another thread. I am not going to cooperate with an attempt to derail this discussion.
The genetic code is different from language precisely because it is impossible to utter new and functional and grammatically correct statements in genetic code. It is impossible to design in genetic code.
We are also in the early stages of learning to travel faster than light.
If you wish to present design as an alternative to evolution, please demonstrate at the most elementary level possible, how to distinguish a novel working gene from the same sequence with one character modified. Without doing the chemistry.
is what what you would expect to see?
peace
Empirical research indicates that creative processes do not work that way in general.
Instead we continually interact with the medium, and based on that, we revise our design/vision, which we then realize in the medium, and so on.
You can think of the medium as an extension of the mind in a certain sense.
It is not a matter of approximately realizing a vision; it is a matter of creating that vision by using the resources of brain/body/world in concert.
Not that that has much to do with this thread, unless you interpret it as aligned with Petrushka’s ideas that biological design requires experimentation through evolution.
Large sections of reused maternal that have been copy pasted from one place to another.
Reasonable, my only point is that this place is mild compared to theistic UD
Actors behave differently in front of a live audience than in front of a camera. The audience shapes the performance in real time. There is no idealized performance.
The thing I’m getting at is that new functions, including new regulatory functions cannot be designed. There is now ideal for a new function. There are new functions occasionally arising by chance and occasionally being fixed in the population’s genome.
If IDists want to assert that new functionality can be anticipated and designed, let them demonstrate the process. Give us a proof of concept.
Oh, absolutely. What I’m doing is asking fmm if he even knows there is a difference between something designed by a designer and something that has evolved.
If the genome is designed, then it’s designed by someone who has ignored every single design principle humanity has come up with. And they don’t seem to appreciate that. Mung and his “I’ve got books about design” for example.
So if fmm cannot tell me what he’d expect to see in a designed and an evolved genome then perhaps he’ll understand what the problem is.
I agree and how one uses those resources is dependent on many factors. So does that exclude natural forces acting alone from design? In other words, is Delicate Arch designed or is it just a design?
Yes ,it is certainly off topic to discuss how design comes to be in a thread about ID theory of design.
I will check it out
We have enough recorded history to know that Medieval arches and domes were designed by a process not unlike the way natural arches arise. Keep removing material until they fall down, then back off a notch.
Now we can do that in software.
One of the characteristics of the materials used by human designers is that they respond in regular ways to modifications.
Materials have tensile strength, compression strength, and so forth. These can be measured, and combinations of materials can be tested and recorded. Things can be put together in more or less predictable ways.
Occasionally some unexpected stress causes a bridge or building to collapse, but these are also noted and wend their way into construction codes.
There is nothing equivalent in the genetic code.
When you are not copying and pasting existing working code, you have no clue as to whether a sequence is functional or not. You cannot run Fifth’s magic program or any other program to determine — outside chemistry — what a sequence means or might mean.
The only algorithm that can reliably fold proteins is chemistry itself. There are not enough particles in the universe to store all the useful and not useful sequences, and there are no algorithms that can be used to assemble completely novel functional sequences.
The whole ID enterprise is based on Harry Potter magic thinking. Poofery. Incantation.
All the thoughts o Dembski and Behe and all the denizens of Discovery Institute and Uncommon Descent are rubbish and will remain rubbish.
Because biology cannot be designed except by cut and try.
I guess it depends on how you define design or “as-if design”, if that is part of your vocabulary. Such a definition process done in isolation is not a topic that interests me.
Instead, I’d say that if you want to claim you are doing science or proposing scientific theories, then you have to meet the norms of scientific discourse in the relevant domain.
(ETA: A recent Philosophy Bites has
Massimo Pigliucci on the Demarcation Problem if you want to explore what makes a domain of discourse scientific).