We’ve been discussing souls and such as if humans are exceptional — not part of a continuum.
Invention
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Author Archives: petrushka
“The Advance of Knowledge Over Faith”
This post is inspired by a phrase appearing in the latest Discovery Institute essay, in which they worry about the direction being taken by the new “Cosmos” TV series.
The DI quotes Cosmos producer, Seth MacFarlane, as promoting “…the advancement of knowledge over faith.”
This quote seems to come from an interview in Esquire Magazine.
There really isn’t much to the interview, but the phrase does kind of jump out and beg to be discussed.
The capriciousness of intelligent agency
Scordova at UD asks a question that I find interesting.
By way of contrast, intelligent agencies, particularly those intelligent agencies which we presume have free will, cannot be counted upon to behave in predictable manners in certain domains. Even presuming some intelligent agencies (say machine “intelligence”) are deterministic, they can be an unpredictable black box to outside observers. This makes it difficult to make direct experimental confirmation of certain ID inferences.
It has long been my contention that the defining behavior of science is the search for regularity.
Some regularities can be refined into mathematical equations, which we generally call laws of nature.
BIGGER THAN PHIL: When did faith start to fade?
And here we arrive at what the noes, whatever their numbers, really have now, and that is a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-ball makers: the advantages of having an actual explanation of things and processes are self-evident. What works wins. We know that men were not invented but slowly evolved from smaller animals; that the earth is not the center of the universe but one among a billion planets in a distant corner; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain. A God can still be made in the face of all that absence, but he will always be chairman of the board, holding an office of fine title and limited powers.
This article seems to capsulize much of what we’ve been discussing. Everything from evolution and scientism to atheism and creationism.
[Fill in the Blank] Won the Great Debate. Discuss.
My take (not original) is the Bill Nye framed the debate as between evolution and young earth creationism.
As long as he wasn’t trounced, evolution wins.
Because ID is a big tent and allows YECs a free pass, it is associated with this debate. Unless it publicly distances itself from Ken ham, it has allowed the evolution debate to be framed as between science and biblical literalism.
I, Thou, and Meat Robot
For a duty towards an animal would have to be directed at someone, and if the lights are out and there’s no-one home, then any talk of duties or obligations is meaningless. To be sure, a magnanimous person, motivated by a disinterested ethic of reverence for all living things, might still wish to alleviate the feelings of pain occurring in animals, even while recognizing that these feelings belonged to no-one. But it would no longer be possible to maintain that animals are morally significant “others.” The most we could say is that insofar as they are organisms, animals have a biological “good of their own.” If we adopted this biocentric view, then we would deplore any wanton harm done to animals, just as we would the felling of a Californian redwood tree. But the notion that animals belong on a psychological or moral continuum with us would be forever shattered. For if animals have no “selves,” then they are not “they,” and their pain doesn’t warrant our pity.
VJ Torley has posted an interesting argument regarding animals’ ability to suffer and the ethical implications of various interpretations of animal consciousness. Although VJ has his own conclusions, his post seem to invite discussion rather than agreement or disagreement. He emphasizes the limits of science rather than simply attacking science. I would suggest he also demonstrates some limits to philosophy.
Mapou helpfully sets up the main line of discussion:
Why beat around the bush? Science cannot even prove that humans are conscious, let alone animals. There is no experiment that can directly detect consciousness. It is a subjective phenomenon. We may know that we are conscious but we can only assume that other humans are equally conscious.
Mapou goes on to say that he considers animals to be meat robots and outside of any consideration of their welfare. I would argue that we draw our lines of demarcation on some basis other than evidence or logic. I personally think this problem of demarcation cannot be solved by reason.
I think we as individuals draw the line between creatures that merit ethical consideration and those that don’t, and I think we do this for purely emotional reasons. Some of us see someone home behind the eyes of non-humans.
Matzke on Meyer: the blind leading the blind
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/10/meyer-on-medved.html
Major criticisms of Darwin’s Doubt by informed critics:
1. Meyer’s book, which is supposed to be about the Cambrian Explosion, gets the Cambrian Explosion fossil record wrong.
2. Meyer says that transitional fossils for the Cambrian groups don’t exist, but fossils with morphology transitional between the crown phyla do exist, oodles of them.
3. Meyer claims that phylogenetic methods are worthless, but doesn’t know that phylogenetic hypotheses are statistical statements and are statistically testable through standard methods – methods which themselves are testable and well-tested.
4. Meyer claims that the evolution of new genetic information is virtually impossible, a claim he is able to sustain mostly because he doesn’t understand the phylogenetic methods (see above) that are necessary for inferring the history of the origin of genes.
5. Meyer’s claim that “massive amounts” of new genetic information was required for the Cambrian Explosion is belied by the fact that gene number, and most of the key developmental patterning genes are shared broadly across the phyla, and even outside of bilaterians, rather than looking like they originated in the midst of the divergence of the phyla.
6. Meyer claims that the “junk DNA” hypothesis has been refuted, and that therefore the 90+ percent of large animal genomes that doesn’t code for genes or gene regulation is actually a massive additional amount of new information, but Meyer doesn’t rebut or even acknowledge the massive, basic, evidential problems with this idea.
6a. Simple calculations show that if most of the DNA in large-genomed organisms like humans was essential, given known mutation rates, we would die from fatal mutations each generation. This was Ohno’s original argument for junk DNA, and it has not been rebutted by ENCODE, the creationists, or anyone else.
6b. Genome sizes in complex animals and plants vary by orders of magnitude within many specific groups (tetrapods, onions, ferns, salamanders, arthropods, whatever), but despite this, within each group they all have about the same number of genes, and approximately the same organs and developmental complexity.
6c. When you actually look at the sequences in the variable fraction of the genome, most of it looks like the product of mutational processes with no selective filtering – transposon remnants, fossil viruses, duplications and other mutational errors, etc. Furthermore, unlike genes and important regulatory regions, which are well-conserved between closely related species, the apparent junk DNA looks like it has no constraint.the same organs and developmental complexity.
Edited to fix 6c.
Something Completely Different
I’ve argued for some time that design is impossible unless the designer is omniscient (because the emergent properties of organic molecules cannot be anticipated).
I have no proof of this, of course, but it seems reasonable to ask design advocates to demonstrate proof of concept. Tell us how design is done without cut and try.
This led me to think a bit about what omniscience means.
ID rage when the multiverse is mentioned — the notion that many universes having differing physical constants might exist simultaneously, making the fine tuning argument moot.
So I thought I might ask if anyone can point out a conceptual difference between an existence in which all possible universes exist, and the mind of an omniscient god, in which all possible universes exist.
I don’t know if this is a serious question, but I thought it might be fun.
When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship (Review of Darwin’s Doubt)
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6152/1344.1.full
Just in case We haven beaten this book to death, let’s have another round.
His case against current scientific explanations of the relatively rapid appearance of the animal phyla rests on the claim that the origin of new animal body plans requires vast amounts of novel genetic information coupled with the unsubstantiated assertion that this new genetic information must include many new protein folds. In fact, our present understanding of morphogenesis indicates that new phyla were not made by new genes but largely emerged through the rewiring of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) of already existing genes.
As Meyer points out, he is not a biologist; so perhaps he could be excused for basing his scientific arguments on an outdated understanding of morphogenesis. But my disappointment runs deeper than that. It stems from Meyer’s systematic failure of scholarship. For instance, while I was flattered to find him quote one of my own review papers—although the quote is actually a chimera drawn from two very different parts of my review—he fails to even mention the review’s (and many other papers’) central point: that new genes did not drive the Cambrian explosion. His scholarship, where it matters most, is highly selective.
Charles R. Marshall
The word “chimera” is interesting. The rules of this site forbid characterizing what Meyer did
A Challenge to ericB, gpuccio, UprightBiped, et al
The origin of the genetic code seems to be a hot issue in the ID community. Take a look at this and tell us what you think.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0072225
The genetic code shapes the genetic repository. Its origin has puzzled molecular scientists for over half a century and remains a long-standing mystery. Here we show that the origin of the genetic code is tightly coupled to the history of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase enzymes and their interactions with tRNA.
A timeline of evolutionary appearance of protein domain families derived from a structural census in hundreds of genomes reveals the early emergence of the ‘operational’ RNA code and the late implementation of the standard genetic code. The emergence of codon specificities and amino acid charging involved tight coevolution of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases and tRNA structures as well as episodes of structural recruitment.
Remarkably, amino acid and dipeptide compositions of single-domain proteins appearing before the standard code suggest archaic synthetases with structures homologous to catalytic domains of tyrosyl-tRNA and seryl-tRNA synthetases were capable of peptide bond formation and aminoacylation.
Results reveal that genetics arose through coevolutionary interactions between polypeptides and nucleic acid cofactors as an exacting mechanism that favored flexibility and folding of the emergent proteins. These enhancements of phenotypic robustness were likely internalized into the emerging genetic system with the early rise of modern protein structure.
I realize their conclusions are speculative. So feel free to point out where they are wrong.
Knocking Out Evolution?
DennisJones at UncommonDescent has published an argument that Behe’s irreducible complexity has resisted all attempts at refutation.
…The only logic fallacy would be to draw a conclusion while resisting further examination. Such is not the case with irreducible complexity. The hypothesis has endured 17 years of laboratory research by molecular biologists, and the research continues to this very day.
An irreducibly complex system is one that
(a) the removal of a protein renders the molecular machine inoperable, and
(b) the biochemical structure has no stepwise evolutionary pathway.Here’s how one would set up examination by using gene knockout, reverse engineering, study of homology, and genome sequencing:
I. To CONFIRM Irreducible Complexity:
Show:
1. The molecular machine fails to operate upon the removal of a protein.
AND,
2. The biochemical structure has no evolutionary precursor.
II. To FALSIFY Irreducible Complexity:
Show:
1. The molecular machine still functions upon loss of a protein.
OR,
2. The biochemical structure DOES have an evolutionary pathway
My (limited) understanding is that (1) will nearly always be confirmed.
The problem is confirming (2), the assertion that there is no evolutionary pathway.