Barry finally gets it?

Barry Arrington was astonished to find that Larry Moran agreed with him that it would be possible for some future biologist to detect design in a Venter-designed genome.

He was further astonished to find that REC, a commenter at UD, agreed with Larry Moran.

Barry expresses his epiphany in a UD post REC Becomes a Design Proponent.

Has Barry finally realised that those of us who oppose the ideas of Intelligent Design proponents do not dispute that it is possible, in principle, to make a reasonable inference of design?  That rather our opposition is based on the evidence and argument advanced, not on some principled (or unprincipled!) objection to the entire project?

Sadly, it seems not.  Because Barry then gives some examples of his continued lack of appreciation of this point.  Here they are:

For example, consider this typical objection:  “All scientific claims must employ methodological naturalism, and you violate the principle of methodological naturalism when you make a design inference in biology.”

If that objection is valid (it is not, but set that aside for now), it is just as valid against REC’s and Dr. Moran’s design inferences as it is against any other design inference.

Yes, indeed, Barry.  It is not a valid objection, and if it were, it would be as valid against REC’s and Dr. Moran’s as against ID.  There is nothing wrong with making a design inference in principle. We do it all the time, as IDists like to point out.  And there’s nothing wrong with making it in biology, at least in principle.  There is certainly nothing that violates the “principle of methodological naturalism when you make a design inference in biology”.  I wonder where Barry found that quotation?

The point sailed right over REC’s head.  He responded that the objections were not valid as to his design inference, because his design inference (opposed to ID’s design inferences) was “valid and well evidenced.”

I doubt it sailed over REC’s head.  I expect it was the very point he was making – that there  is no reason in principle why one cannot make a valid design inference in biology, but whether the inference is valid or not would depend on the specifics of the evidence and argument.

But that is exactly what ID proponents have been saying for decades REC!  We have been saying all along that the various “typical objections” are invalid if the evidence leads to a design inference.

REC, the only difference between you and us is that you are persuaded by the evidence in a particular case and not in our case.  But you are missing the point.  If what is important is the EVIDENCE, then th “typical objections” lose all force all the time.

Barry, consider the possibility that you have been misreading the “typical objections” the entire time.  That the yards of text that are spilled daily at UD railing against Lewontin and us benighted “materialists” are entirely irrelevant.   The objection to ID by people like me (and Moran, and REC, and any other ID opponent I’ve come across, including Richard Dawkins in fact) is not that it is impossible that terrestrial life was designed by an intelligent agent, nor that it would be necessarily impossible to discover that it was, nor even, I suggest, impossible to infer a designer even if we had no clue as to who the designer might be (although that might make it trickier).  The objection is that the arguments advanced by ID proponents are fallacious.  They don’t work.  Some are circular, some are based on bad math, and some are based on a misunderstanding of biochemistry and biology.  They are not bad because they are design inferences, they are bad because they are bad design inferences.

In other words, the objection “all scientific claims must employ methodological naturalism” is invalid in principle, not in application, if it is even possible to make a valid design inference based on the EVIDENCE.

And here is where Barry steps on the rake again. Of course all scientific claims must employ methodological naturalism. It’s the only methodology we have in science – it is another way of saying that scientific claims must be falsifiable.  That doesn’t mean we can’t infer design. Design is a perfectly natural phenomenon.  If Barry means that we can only infer natural, not supernatural, design, he is absolutely correct, but that is simply because a supernatural design hypothesis is unfalsifiable. The reason Lewontin was correct is not that science is terrified of letting the supernatural in the door of science lest we have to face our worst nightmares, but that if you accept the supernatural as a valid hypothesis, you throw falsifiability out of the window.

You agree with us that it is the EVIDENCE that is important, and objections thrown up for the purpose of ruling that evidence out of court before it is even considered are invalid.

Yes, it is the EVIDENCE that is important,  But on the other side of the EVIDENCE coin are the predictions we derive from the theory that we are testing against that EVIDENCE. If there are no predictions – and a theory that can predict anything predicts nothing – then we have no way of evaluating whether our EVIDENCE supports our theory.  In fact, the word EVIDENCE only makes sense in relation to a theory. I’m no lawyer (heh) but doesn’t there have to be a charge before there is a trial?

Of course, by the same token, nobody can claim that ID is false – it may well be true that life was designed by a supernatural designer, whether at the origin-of-life stage as some claim, or at key stages, such as the Cambrian “Explosion” (scare quotes deliberate), as others claim; or for certain features too hard to leave to evolution such as the E.coli flagellae that enhance their ability to maim and kill our children. Or even to design a universe so fine-tuned that it contains the laws and materials necessary for life to emerge without further interference.   Science cannot falsify any of that – nor, for that matter the theory that it was all created ex nihilo Last Thursday.

That’s why nothing in evolutionary biology is a threat to belief in God or gods, and why the paranoia surrounding “methodological naturalism” is so completely misplaced.

What is a threat to us all, though, I suggest, is bad science masquerading as science, and that is my objection to ID.  Not the “broader” project itself as stated in the UD FAQ:

In a broader sense, Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. Design detection is used in a number of scientific fields, including anthropology, forensic sciences that seek to explain the cause of events such as a death or fire, cryptanalysis and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). An inference that certain biological information may be the product of an intelligent cause can be tested or evaluated in the same manner as scientists daily test for design in other sciences.

but its fallacious (in my view) conclusion that:

…that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.

Fallacious not because I assume that the “intelligent cause” is supernatural, but because the math and biochemistry simply do not support that inference.  Even if it’s true.

1,072 thoughts on “Barry finally gets it?

  1. Elizabeth: Sure.How would you define “intelligence” as in “Intelligent design” William?

    In other words, what do you think ID proponents are actually claiming?

    I guess Moran and REC get a free pass when it comes to definitions and methodology, eh?

  2. Rich,

    In order for us to recognize / detect the supernatural, it must leave its mark on ‘the natural’ in some way.

    Agreed, given that no one seems able to directly detect the supernatural.

    This is our only way of perceiving what is. There may be supernatural things that don’t intersect with the natural at all, and we’ll never know them.

    Agreed.

    But functionally, no effect, no change in nature = no force / entity / magisteria.

    Not quite. As you pointed out, there might be supernatural entities that don’t interact with nature at all and are therefore undetectable to us.

    But it sounds like you agree with my fundamental point, which is that “testable” does not automatically imply “natural”. Supernatural hypotheses can be testable, but only if they have observable consequences.

  3. Flint,

    I’m not following this. I can easily understand that anything natural can be tested in principle, and anything insufficiently defined can’t be reasonably tested. So far, I haven’t seen any useful definition of “supernatural”.

    Why not simply accept the prevailing usage of “supernatural”, referring to purported entities that operate outside of the laws of nature? Things like gods, angels, and demons?

    My reading is that we have not discussed any supernatural hypotheses. Making a testable claim doesn’t magically become a claim of the supernatural simply because we add “oh, and it happened by magic.”

    Sure it does, as long as you’re clear about what you mean by “it happened by magic.” There is no limit on hypotheses. You can hypothesize anything, but to get your hypothesis accepted by the scientific community, it needs to outcompete its rivals.

    We can test the claim of a young earth without the meaningless “supernatural” window dressing, which isn’t properly part of the claim at all.

    But then you aren’t testing the same claim.

    “The earth is less than 10,000 years old” is a different claim from “Yahweh created the earth less than 10,000 years ago”. The latter could be false even if the former were true. Likewise, “magnets attract steel” is a different claim from “magnets attract steel solely due to gravity”, for the same reason.

  4. keiths,

    Agree – I used the word “functionally”, I mean it like I meant here: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/a-thread-for-william-j-murray-to-unpack-the-alternatives-to-materialismphysicalismnaturalism/comment-page-3/#comment-49674

    EDIT TO CLARIFY: So we functionally “live our lives” as if there is no supernatural. I know some folks pray and whatnot, but no one is teleporting, although KF saw some high miraculous non-levitating levitation. Thae that LNC! http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=14;t=8960;st=60#entry244209

  5. cubist,

    I’ve never understood why some people say that “methodological naturalism” prevents science from investigating quote-supernatural-unquote things. Methodological naturalism is about methodology, okay? It’s about the tools and techniques you use to investigate stuff.

    We’ve had this discussion before:

    keiths on April 27, 2014 at 7:01 am said:

    cubist,

    I must have been doing it wrong all this time. I thought that methodological naturalism was about methodology—the techniques and tools and yada yada you use to do whatever-it-is you do.

    It is about methodology, but the methodology in question includes limits on the hypotheses that are permissible.

    I had no idea that methodological naturalism was a barrier to studying supernatural thingies!

    Now you know.

    It’s been an issue in the ID wars for years. Philosopher of science Robert Pennock, who testified for the plaintiffs in the Dover trial, put it this way:

    Similarly, science does not have a special rule just to keep out divine interventions, but rather a general rule that it does not handle any supernatural agents or powers. That is what it means to hold methodological naturalism…

    ID proponents complain (and rightly so, in my opinion) that this excludes supernatural causes from consideration. I agree that such a restriction is unnecessary and runs counter to the spirit of open scientific inquiry.

    I also think that supernatural hypotheses have a dismal track record, and I will be very surprised if any of them are validated any time soon. That’s no reason to rule them out ahead of time, however.

    It would appear that my confusion is shared by many other people, including all those scientists who have conducted (what they thought were) methodologically naturalistic studies of supernatural-type matters such as the efficacy of prayer.

    Did they think they were practicing methodological naturalism?

    Apparently, all those scientists, and me, have been laboring under the misguided impression that what matters to methodological naturalism is not that the thing-being-studied is natural, but, rather, that the thing-being-studied is testable.

    No, testability matters to science generally, not just to methodological naturalism. The thing that distinguishes methodological naturalism is its exclusion of supernatural hypotheses.

    To be sure, if you made a Venn diagram of “claims which are not testable” and “claims which are supernatural”, there would be one heck of a large degree of overlap between those two circles.

    That’s right.

    Nevertheless, I’d been under the impression that it’s untestability which MN can’t handle. But apparently I was wrong…

    Yep. Here’s Eugenie Scott, former director of the NCSE:

    Science is a way of knowing that attempts to explain the natural world using natural causes. It is agnostic toward the supernatural – it neither confirms nor rejects it.

    There’s a reason it’s called methodological naturalism.

  6. Richardthughes: In order for us to recognize / detect the supernatural, it must leave its mark on ‘the natural’ in some way. This is our only way of perceiving what is. There may be supernatural things that don’t intersect with the natural at all, and we’ll never know them. But functionally, no effect, no change in nature = no force / entity / magisteria.

    Exactly.

    So let me concede that in that sense Lewontin was indeed wrong. It is not that we must not LET “the Divine Foot” in the door of science, but that the Divine Foot is welcome as long as its interaction with the door is detectable and at least statistically predictable.

  7. It is easy to believe design if we have experience in knowing the designer.

    Believing man-made designs is a different category than believing in God-made designs.

    http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/the-absent-non-interactive-invisible-silent-hidden-indifferent-concealed-designer/

    I cringed when I heard an IDist say something to the effect, “we use forensic science all the time to infer design, and this same science demonstrates an Intelligence made life”. The problem is forensic science identifies designs made by humans (or something human like). People generally believe some designer made Stonehenge because they see humans making comparable designs all the time. Many IDists don’t seem to appreciate invoking a never-seen designer poses a challenge for accepting design in biology.

    Even if God created life, because we don’t experience His presence in the same way we experience a human designers’ presence, many find it hard to accept the idea a Creator exists. If God exists, as far as every day human affairs, He appears absent, non-interactive, invisible, silent, hidden, indifferent, concealed etc. In human terms, then, like the tooth fairy, the concept of God in the modern day among the educated, seems irrelevant at best, false and harmful at worst.

    For someone to accept God as creator, he must come to terms with the problem of God’s lack of obvious interaction in every day life. Why the silence, and concealment?

    and

    “God, if you are there, why are you so hard to find?”

    Bertrand Russell

    I accept God-made design in biology, but its not the same as Ventner-made designs because we know Ventner, and he put his personal watermark in the DNA so it can be identified as his:

    http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/24/venters-newest-synthetic-bacteria-has-secret-messages-coded-in-its-dna/

    These messages used codons, groups of three letters which code for amino acids, to stand for 20 letters of the alphabet. As such, some substitutions (like ‘v’ for ‘u’) were necessary. The results were relatively simple but still pretty cool:
    •CRAIGVENTER coded as:
    TTAACTAGCTAATGTCGTGCAATTGGAGTAGAGAACACAGAACGATTAACTAGCTAA
    •VENTERINSTITVTE coded as:
    TTAACTAGCTAAGTAGAAAACACCGAACGAATTAATTCTACGATTACCGTGACTGAGTTAACTAGCTAA
    •HAMSMITH coded as:
    TTAACTAGCTAACATGCAATGTCGATGATTACCCACTTAACTAGCTAA
    •CINDIANDCLYDE coded as:
    TTAACTAGCTAATGCATAAACGACATCGCTAATGACTGTCTTTATGATGAATTAACTAGCTAATGGGTC
    GATGTTTGATGTTATGGAGCAGCAACGATGTTACGCAGCAGGGCAGTCGCCCTAAAACAAAGTTAAACATCATG
    •GLASSANDCLYDE coded as:
    TTAACTAGCTAAGGTCTAGCTAGTAGCGCGAATGACTGCCTATACGATGAG TTAACTAGCTAA

    The closest thing to a forensic clue we have in biology that I can think of is the Parsons study of mitochondrial DNA that suggests humans had a common female ancestor 6,500 years ago, which points to the Judeo-Christian God as the Designer.

  8. the Divine Foot is welcome as long as its interaction with the door is detectable and at least statistically predictable.

    If God were statistically predictable, it would be a law of physics like electromagnetism, not God (unless one thinks the laws of physics are kind of a “god”). But such a God that would be at our disposal would be no God at all. It would be an impersonal law like the law of large numbers or Newtons laws of motion.

  9. stcordova: The closest thing to a forensic clue we have in biology that I can think of is the Parsons study of mitochondrial DNA that suggests humans had a common female ancestor 6,500 years ago, which points to the Judeo-Christian God as the Designer.

    So, going back to YEC are we? Or did you ever leave? And why does it point to one particular god and not another? There are plenty to choose from you know!

  10. stcordova: I accept God-made design in biology

    Yet

    stcordova: The closest thing to a forensic clue we have in biology that I can think of is

    You accept design in biology by god but can only think of a single example of why that is, and even they you are vague?

    Ever thought about reserving your opinions and spending them on things that are actually supported by evidence rather than starting with what you want to be true then looking for evidence for it?

  11. stcordova: If God were statistically predictable, it would be a law of physics like electromagnetism, not God (unless one thinks the laws of physics are kind of a “god”).But such a God that would be at our disposal would be no God at all.It would be an impersonal law like the law of large numbers or Newtons laws of motion.

    Exactly, Sal. That is exactly my point: we cannot test for God because we can only test for statistically predictable effects, and if a god is a statistically predictable effect that god “would be no God at all”.

  12. “It is easy to believe design if we have experience in knowing the designer. Believing man-made designs is a different category than believing in God-made designs.” – stcordova

    Sometimes, yes, sometimes you make sense Sal (which is probably why some of the hard core IDists at UD are upset with you). I and many others have been saying the same thing for years. It’s the IDists and ‘creationists’ who have resisted this based on their insistence of ‘strict scientificity’ for their ‘Creation science’ and/or IDist views.

    All social scientists and applied scientists accept (or ‘believe in’, if you will) lowercase ‘design’ as a simple fact of human culture. But calling ‘God-made designs’ an inclusive category of natural-physical science is, to say the least, highly problematic.

  13. stcordova,

    The closest thing to a forensic clue we have in biology that I can think of is the Parsons study of mitochondrial DNA that suggests humans had a common female ancestor 6,500 years ago, which points to the Judeo-Christian God as the Designer.

    Huh? 65,000 years ago more like. Which still says nothing about the coalescence times of the rest of the genome, which outguns the mitochondrial fragment many-fold. This is a really bad argument for Creationism, even if it wasn’t an order of magnitude the wrong way.

  14. Adapa: Sorry but “Science doesn’t know yet” does not translate into “it’s impossible through natural means so my God, er, the Intelligent Designer did it”.

    Arrhm…. the ” we don’t know yet” canard.

    If that would be the case ( it isn’t ) , that would not mean naturalism. That would be a nice attempt of ” naturalism of the gaps” .

    An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional. Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on. It is almost universally conceded that such a sudden event would be irreconcilable with the gradualism Darwin envisioned.”In the quote above, Behe notes that there is a fundamental quality of any irreducibly complex system in that, “any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.” Behe elaborates upon this definition saying”An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway.”

    microbiologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago declared in National Review that (Shapiro 1996)

    “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”

    In Trends in Ecology and Evolution Tom Cavalier-Smith, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia, nonetheless wrote:

    “For none of the cases mentioned by Behe is there yet a comprehensive and detailed explanation of the probable steps in the evolution of the observed complexity. The problems have indeed been sorely neglected–though Behe repeatedly exaggerates this neglect with such hyperboles as ‘an eerie and complete silence.'” (Cavalier-Smith 1997)

    What type of biological system could not be formed by “numerous successive, slight modifications?” Well, for starters, a system that is irreducibly complex.

    By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the [core] parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

    But today, there are many such cases observed in nature.

    High information content machine-like irreducibly complex and interdependent structures, of which photosynthesis, the eye, the human body, nitrogenase, the ribosome, the cell, rubisco, photosystem II, the oxygen evolving complex etc. are prime examples, are commonly found in nature.
    Since Evolution is unable to provide a advantage of adaptation in each evolutionary step, and is unable to select it, 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed.

    Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information, irreducible and interdependent biological systems.
    Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information, irreducible and interdependent systems of all sorts.
    Conclusion: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information and irreducible complexity in the cell, and interdependence of proteins, organelles, and bodyparts, and even of animals and plants, aka moths and flowers, for example.

    http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1468-irreducible-complexity

  15. otangelo,

    Since Evolution is unable to provide a advantage of adaptation in each evolutionary step, and is unable to select it, 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed.

    That’s not how you’d falsify evolution. Nor is it how you’d confirm Design. Your conclusions are unwarranted by the process you go through.

    (Side-note: incremental advantage is not required for evolution).

  16. otangelo,

    If its not required , how do you go from bacteria to humans over supposed billions of years ??!!

    The culmination of numerous factors, including but hardly restricted to Natural Selection. You want an audit of every step in those million million or so generations?

  17. otangelo,

    Sorry, but in defending (neo-creationist) uppercase Intelligent Design ‘theory’ (not the usual lowercase intelligent design that all we Abrahamic theists already accept) you are simply demonstrating apologetic low-hanging fruit.

  18. otangelo: Conclusion: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation

    Well, what is it then, other then “the designer designed”?

  19. stcordova: The closest thing to a forensic clue we have in biology that I can think of is the Parsons study of mitochondrial DNA that suggests humans had a common female ancestor 6,500 years ago, which points to the Judeo-Christian God as the Designer.

    HAHahahahahahah…

  20. otangelo: An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional.

    Prove that such a system exists in biology.

    Just to remind you, your definition of irreducible complexity here is different from the one used by Michael Behe and other ID proponents. Yours carries with it the assertion that any intermediate is BY DEFINITION NONFUNCTIONAL.

    Okay, but then your definition is without a known referent in biology. Effectively you’ve burdened yourself with the claim that you know that there is no possible functional intermediate state to whatever biological structure you have in mind. How could you possibly know that?

  21. Exactly, Sal. That is exactly my point: we cannot test for God because we can only test for statistically predictable effects, and if a god is a statistically predictable effect that god “would be no God at all”.

    One of the few times we generally agree.

    That’s why I said:

    http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/id-should-not-be-promoted-as-science-but-instead/

    If the design of life came about by mechanisms outside those that can be demonstrated in laboratory experiment and are outside physical laws of chemistry and physics, then even if ID were true, ID might not be properly called science. Therefore I think ID should not be promoted as science.

  22. otangelo: Arrhm…. the ” we don’t know yet” canard.

    If that would be the case ( it isn’t ) , that would not mean naturalism. That would be a nice attempt of ” naturalism of the gaps”

    Every last event and phenomenon we’ve investigated in the last 400 years has turned out to be due to natural causes. It is therefore correct to assume a natural cause for an event even if the specific details of the event are unknown. There has been zero evidence ever produced for an Intelligent Designer of original life.

    An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional.

    Wrong because 1) a system can evolve with multiple parts doing the same function then lose one to become IC and 2) nothing prevents a system or its parts from changing its function on the way to becoming IC. Both of those examples have been documented in real world cases. IC as an argument for ID has been dead and buried for years. Even Behe doesn’t use it anymore.

  23. stcordova:

    The closest thing to a forensic clue we have in biology that I can think of is the Parsons study of mitochondrial DNA that suggests humans had a common female ancestor 6,500 years ago, which points to the Judeo-Christian God as the Designer.

    (facepalm) Sal, please tell us you understand evidence for a “mitochondrial eve” doesn’t mean there was only one woman alive at that time.

  24. Rumraket: Effectively you’ve burdened yourself with the claim that you know that there is no possible functional intermediate state to whatever biological structure you have in mind. How could you possibly know that?

    I would comment, but it would violate the site rules.

  25. (facepalm) Sal, please tell us you understand evidence for a “mitochondrial eve” doesn’t mean there was only one woman alive at that time.

    I used the word “suggests”.

    The other issue is that of genetic deterioration in terms of functionality. Why aren’t we dead 100 time over given the mutational load is only 1 or 2 bad (as in function breaking) per human per generation, yet we have a mutation rate far higher than that.

    The response is usually, “well that doesn’t matter since most of the genome is junk, like 90%”. Actually that’s not consistent with what GWAS studies are indicating.

    ENCODEs 3 sister projects:
    1. various GWAS inquiries
    2. NIH Roadmap
    3. NIH E4

    could confirm functional value in 90% of the genome in various cell types and tissue types and developmental stages. Thus the mutational load would be incompatible with an evolutionary scenario.

  26. Adapa: Even Behe doesn’t use it anymore.

    Behe seems to have modified his argument to assert that evolving some systems requires passing through a detrimental stage, or having two or more simultaneous mutations.

    A far cry from his original argument, and still wrong.

  27. Sal, genetic load demonstrates that for 90 percent of the genome, sequence just doesn’t matter.

    Whether functional or not, mutations just don’t matter.

    That’s an observation, not a theory.

  28. Sal:

    If God were statistically predictable, it would be a law of physics like electromagnetism, not God (unless one thinks the laws of physics are kind of a “god”). But such a God that would be at our disposal would be no God at all. It would be an impersonal law like the law of large numbers or Newtons laws of motion.

    Lizzie:

    Exactly, Sal. That is exactly my point: we cannot test for God because we can only test for statistically predictable effects, and if a god is a statistically predictable effect that god “would be no God at all”.

    That makes no sense. By that logic, a God who answered prayers would be “no God at all”.

  29. stcordova,

    I used the word “suggests”.

    If ‘an order of magnitude out’ means ‘suggests’, I suppose … The Parsons study relates to a highly polymorphic region of the mitochondrial genome. It can’t be used as a clock for the mitochondrion, let alone the nucleus. Best estimates are 100,000-200,000 years for Mitochondrial Eve.

    The rest of the genome will coalesce much, much further back in some instances (eg blood group genes, which predate the human-chimp split). As evidence of a biblical Eve, let alone an Adam, coalescence is useless. It points in completely the wrong direction for your purposes.

  30. Elizabeth: Exactly, Sal. That is exactly my point: we cannot test for God because we can only test for statistically predictable effects, and if a god is a statistically predictable effect that god “would be no God at all”.

    That depends on your definition of “god”. 😉

  31. Elizabeth: Exactly.

    So let me concede that in that sense Lewontin was indeed wrong.It is not that we must not LET “the Divine Foot” in the door of science, but that the Divine Foot is welcome as long as its interaction with the door is detectable and at least statistically predictable.

    I don’t read Lewontin as disagreeing with you, despite the repeated quote mining by one UD regular who would like people to believe otherwise. Here’s the full divine foot quote:

    “Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. … Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

    Lewontin is mocking the idea that scientists have an a priori commitment to materialism. In the part I bolded he explains why gods are not considered, which I think mirrors your statement above.

  32. Patrick: I don’t read Lewontin as disagreeing with you, despite the repeated quote mining by one UD regular who would like people to believe otherwise. Here’s the full divine foot quote:

    Until proven otherwise, it is safest to assume that anything presented as evidence by an IDist is a quote mine and contradicts the intended meaning of the original author.

    Not always true, but you could make money betting this way.

  33. stcordova: It is easy to believe design if we have experience in knowing the designer.

    Believing man-made designs is a different category than believing in God-made designs.

    That’s what makes ID religion and not science.

    For myself, I have not ruled out design. But all of the evidence suggests that if there was design, then it was design of evolutionary processes (the overall system of evolution) rather than design of individual “kinds”. And that’s where creationism and ID go wrong. They want it to be the individual kinds that were designed.

  34. petrushka:

    Patrick: I don’t read Lewontin as disagreeing with you, despite the repeated quote mining by one UD regular who would like people to believe otherwise. Here’s the full divine foot quote:

    Until proven otherwise, it is safest to assume that anything presented as evidence by an IDist is a quote mine and contradicts the intended meaning of the original author.

    Not always true, but you could make money betting this way.

    Yep.

  35. Patrick: Lewontin is mocking the idea that scientists have an a priori commitment to materialism. In the part I bolded he explains why gods are not considered, which I think mirrors your statement above.

    Yes, I think it does. But I also see why it is misread.

    But whatever, the principle is clear; you can’t test a theory that doesn’t make predictions, and you can’t make predictions if your putative causal agent can act without constraint.

  36. Allan Miller:
    otangelo,

    The culmination of numerous factors, including but hardly restricted to Natural Selection. You want an audit of every step in those million million or so generations?

    No, just describe the mechanism which provokes macro change and the evidence to back up your claim would be enough.

  37. otangelo: No, just describe the mechanism which provokes macro change and the evidence to back up your claim would be enough.

    What ya gots to do is sneak up behind the critter, and make a real loud noise. Not just loud, mind, like normal loud, but loud loud. Like yer daddy taught ya. So, you makes that noise see and the critter gets such an extensitensial shock that it rebounds into reality for just a second and forgets who it is, see, and when it lands again it lands in a slightly different archytype. It’s never coming back to the one it left see as that ones gone, the loud loud noise took care of that one.

    Macroevolution. Ta-da!

  38. Rumraket: Prove that such a system exists in biology.

    Just to remind you, your definition of irreducible complexity here is different from the one used by Michael Behe and other ID proponents. Yours carries with it the assertion that any intermediate is BY DEFINITION NONFUNCTIONAL.

    Okay, but then your definition is without a known referent in biology. Effectively you’ve burdened yourself with the claim that you know that there is no possible functional intermediate state to whatever biological structure you have in mind. How could you possibly know that?

    Well, thats what Behe said :

    Michael Behe’s “Evolutionary” Definition — “An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway.” (A Response to Critics of Darwin’s Black Box, 2002)

  39. otangelo: Michael Behe’s “Evolutionary” Definition — “An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway.

    Most evolution is “unselected”. Nearly all change is neutral.

  40. stcordova: One of the few times we generally agree.

    That’s why I said:

    http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/id-should-not-be-promoted-as-science-but-instead/

    http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t242-is-intelligent-design-science

    there is one result that SETI scientists could produce that would immediately end all objections. This would be the case if SETI not only received a narrow-band carrier signal, but was also able to retrieve and translate the encoded message within that signal. In order to accomplish this, the researchers would have to isolate the representations within the signal medium and they would have to decipher the protocols that translate those representations into meaning. SETI researchers have already anticipated this exact opportunity; suggesting that even if the message was not decipherable, they would analyze it by other methodologies, perhaps (for instance) to determine how much information the message contained.
    As a matter of brute fact, it would be the discovery of this semiotic content within the signal that would immediately end all questions as to its intelligent origin. Its authenticity would become unquestionable based squarely upon the presence of that semiotic content. It simply cannot go unnoticed that the very observation that would make the SETI results unquestionable is the very observation already made within the genome of every living thing on earth. And just as it is in the case of narrow-band radio signals, there is simply no rational conceptualization whereby inanimate forces come together to create a system of spatially-oriented representations, as well as the rules to translate those representations into meaningful effects. Such things are, in fact, a distinct and reliable artifact of design.

  41. petrushka: Most evolution is “unselected”. Nearly all change is neutral.

    Please explain how you go from a Bacteria to humans over billions of years through neutral change.

  42. otangelo: Please explain how you go from a Bacteria to humans over billions of years through neutral change.

    Is that supposed to be a clever argument?

  43. Suppose mainstream science doesn’t have the information you demand.

    What’s your favorite moment in the last 200 years when an ID approach contributed anything useful to the sum of human knowledge?

  44. Adapa: Every last event and phenomenon we’ve investigated in the last 400 years has turned out to be due to natural causes.

    The ONLY event which has been empirically proven to happen naturally is micro evolution. Most of it imho is due to pre programmation of the genome to adapt to the environment.

    http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2043-dna-repair?highlight=repair

    Mechanisms for *non-random* adaptations, coherent with environmental pressures, will be found (already found)

    ID predicts that organisms will exhibit in-built systems which promote evolvability (e.g. front loading).

    The genome has traditionally been treated as a Read-Only Memory (ROM) subject to change by copying errors and accidents. In this review, I propose that we need to change that perspective and understand the genome as an intricately formatted Read-Write (RW) data storage system constantly subject to cellular modifications and inscriptions. Cells operate under changing conditions and are continually modifying themselves by genome inscriptions. These inscriptions occur over three distinct time-scales (cell reproduction, multicellular development and evolutionary change) and involve a variety of different processes at each time scale (forming nucleoprotein complexes, epigenetic formatting and changes in DNA sequence structure). Research dating back to the 1930s has shown that genetic change is the result of cell-mediated processes, not simply accidents or damage to the DNA. This cell-active view of genome change applies to all scales of DNA sequence variation, from point mutations to large-scale genome rearrangements and whole genome duplications (WGDs). This conceptual change to active cell inscriptions controlling RW genome functions has profound implications for all areas of the life sciences.

    The gap is actually not being closed through naturalism, but the more science discovers, the more its recognized that biology is far more complex than previously thought. The explanations through naturalism rather than closing the gaps of knowledge , leave more and more questions unanswered. Here a little list which is far from complete, which illustrates this :

    http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1584-outstanding-and-open-questions-and-problems-in-science#2491

    When you insert intelligent design to answer the open questions, the equation imho suddenly makes sense….

    It is therefore correct to assume a natural cause for an event even if the specific details of the event are unknown.There has been zero evidence ever produced for an Intelligent Designer of original life.

    No, the right position would be to remain agnostic. But i disagree with your view. In my view, the evidence for intelligent design is OVERWHELMING.

    Wrong because 1) a system can evolve with multiple parts doing the same function then lose one to become IC

    Thats a sentence based on lack of understanding how biological systems actually work. I see the cell as a gigantic interlocked, interdependent and irreducible complex system. If you take away one, just ONE tiny protein , and the cell would cease to be functional. Take away the TATA box sequence in the promoter region of the DNA code, and the RNA polymerase will not know where to start transcription. Same with replication. Take away the array of sequence motifs, and the cell will not know where to start replication. How did these sequences arise ? trial and error ? thats just a example. There are literally thousands of others to mention….

    and 2) nothing prevents a system or its parts from changing its function on the way to becoming IC.Both of those examples have been documented in real world cases.IC as an argument for ID has been dead and buried for years.Even Behe doesn’t use it anymore.

    haha. No kidding. I have described 17 ic systems so far. Pick one and try to refute my argument of any of the cited examples :

    http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2166-a-list-of-irreducible-complex-systems

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