Category Archives: Evolution

Dembski’s CSI

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(5th April, 2013: stickying this, for a bit, as it has come up.  Mung might like to comment).

Time to look at this in detail, I think 🙂

His definitive paper to date on CSI, is Specification: The Pattern That
Signifies Intelligence. It is very clearly written, not very mathy, but, by the same token, a paper in which it is easy (IMO) to see where he goes wrong.

Here is the abstract:

ABSTRACT: Specification denotes the type of pattern that highly improbable events must exhibit before one is entitled to attribute them to intelligence. This paper analyzes the concept of specification and shows how it applies to design detection (i.e., the detection of intelligence on the basis of circumstantial evidence). Always in the background throughout this discussion is the fundamental question of Intelligent Design (ID): Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause? This paper reviews, clarifies, and extends previous work on specification in my books The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.

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“Tiktaalik”, Why it is a failed Prediction

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Tiktaalik is still being used as a successful prediction of something. I know it was supposed to be a successful prediction of universal common descent because it is A) Allegedly a transitional form between fish and tetrapods and B) It was found in the “correct” strata because allegedly no evidence of tetrapods before 385 million years ago- plenty of fish though and plenty of evidence for tetrapods around 365 million years ago- Tiktaalik was allegedly found in strata about 375 million years old- Shubin said that is the strata he looked in because of the 365-385 range already bracketed by existing data.

The thinking was tetrapods existed 365 mya and fish existed 385 mya, so the transition happened sometime in that 20 million years.

Sounds very reasonable. And when they looked they found Tiktaalik and all was good.

Then along comes another find that put the earliest tetrapods back to over 390 million years ago.

Now had this find preceded Tiktaalik then Shubin et al. would not have been looking for the transitional after the transition had occurred- that doesn’t make any sense. And that is why it is a failed prediction- the transition occurred some 25 million years before, Shubin et al., were looking in the wrong strata.

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Functional information and the emergence of biocomplexity

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Journal club time again 🙂

I like this paper: Functional information and the emergence of biocomplexity by Hazen et al, 2007 in PNAS, and which I hadn’t been aware of.

I’ve only had time to skim it so far, but as it seems to be an interesting treatment of the concepts variously referred to by ID proponents as CSI, dFCSI, etc, I thought it might be useful.  It is also written with reference to AVIDA.  Here is the abstract:

Complex emergent systems of many interacting components, including complex biological systems, have the potential to perform quantifiable functions. Accordingly, we define “functional information,” I(Ex ), as a measure of system complexity. For a given system and function, x (e.g., a folded RNA sequence that binds to GTP), and degree of function, Ex (e.g., the RNA–GTP binding energy), I(Ex ) = −log2[F(E x)], where F(Ex ) is the fraction of all possible configurations of the system that possess a degree of function ≥ Ex . Functional information, which we illustrate with letter sequences, artificial life, and biopolymers, thus represents the probability that an arbitrary configuration of a system will achieve a specific function to a specified degree. In each case we observe evidence for several distinct solutions with different maximum degrees of function, features that lead to steps in plots of information versus degree of function.

I thought it would be interesting to look at following the thread on Abel’s paper.  I’d certainly be interested in hearing what our ID contributors make of it 🙂

 

Intelligent Design is NOT Anti-Evolution

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Thank you Elizabeth for this opportunity-

Good day- Over the past many, many years, IDists have been telling people that intelligent design is not anti-evolution. Most people understand and accept that, while others just refuse to, no matter what.

With that said, in this post I will provide the evidence (again) that firmly demonstrates that ID is not anti-evolution. I will be presenting several authoritative definitions of “evolution” followed by what the ID leadership has to say about evolution. So without any further adieu, I give you-

Intelligent Design is NOT Anti-Evolution

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Why Methodological Naturalism is a Questionable Philosophy of Science

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Elizabeth started another thread (http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=256) stating that methodological naturalism (MN) “underlies the methodology that we call science.” Later she spoke of “methodological naturalism, as in the working assumption that scientists make about the world in order to predict things.” Then she quoted Wikipedia, which states: “all scientific endeavors—all hypotheses and events—are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events,” adding that this is “more or less the definition I have been assuming.” In other words, science studies ‘nature-only’ because it is naturalistic – it sees nothing other than nature that *could* be studied. Elizabeth sticks with this definition when she says “Science occupies the domain of natural explanations.”

Still later, Elizabeth admitted she is ‘not wild about’ MN (or what I suggested as more accurate of her statements: science applies ‘methodological probabilism’) and also that “‘methodological naturalism’ is a poor term.” Thus, her concession: “now that I realise that the term [MN] appears to denote different things to different people, I will avoid it.” So, the main argument in the OP was deserted.

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Why I find ID fallacious

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Note that I do not say “wrong”.  I don’t think ID is wrong.  I do think that it is not falsifiable.

That is not in itself a problem.  I’d argue that most theories are unfalsiable.  What are falsifiable are the predictive hypotheses we derive from our theories.

So I’ll go out on a limb and say that neither evolutionary theory nor ID are, in themselves, falsifiable.  However, evolutionary theory generates lots of testable hypotheses.  Many of these have proved confirmatory; some have delivered surprises, and as a result, the theory has had to change.  This is a good thing.

In contrast, I would argue, that ID generates very few hypotheses, one exception being “front-loading”, and this remains rudimentary, and, AFAIK, untested.

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Good arguments and straw men

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We seem to have quite a number of posters here who are happy to defend  ID, as well as a number (myself included) who are happy to defend evolutionary theory.

I’m posting this as a kind of straw poll for people to state what they think the major claim of their own position is, and why they find it persuasive; and also what they think the major claim of the opposite position is, and why (if they do) they find it flawed.

It might be interesting to count the straw men standing by the end 🙂  More to the point, it might stop us talking past each other quite so much, and perhaps understand the other side’s position a little more.

Full disclosure: I don’t think myself that the two positions are symmetrical.  But I am constantly brought upn short by the realisation that ID proponents also perceive an assymmetry, but see it as the mirror image of mine.  So I wait enlightenment 🙂

Coyne vs Shapiro

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Interesting exchange between Jerry Coyne and James Shapiro at Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution is true: A colleague wrongfully disses modern evolutionary theory.

(Hat tip to news at Uncommon Descent)

I’ve only skimmed Coyne’s piece and Shapiro’s response so far, but it seems to me that they are talking past each other to some extent.  And Coyne says something silly about cats and dogs.

Have at it.  Gotta run.