As I’ve mentioned, I’m a great fan of Denis Noble, and recommend his book, the Music of Life, but you can get the content pretty well in total in this video of a lecture:
Principle of Systems Biology illustrated using the Virtual Heart
and there’s other material on his site.
So I was interested to see Ann Gauger making a very similar set of points in this piece: Life, Purpose, Mind: Where the Machine Metaphor Fails.
I’ve just started reading it, and was going to post a thread, when I noticed that Phinehas also brought it up at UD, so as I kind of encouragement for him to stick around here for a bit, I thought I’d start one now:)
I’ve only read the first chapter so far (I bought the hardback, but you can read it online here), and I’m finding it fascinating. I’m not sure how “new” it is, but it certainly extends what I thought I knew about fractals and non-linear systems and cellular automata to uncharted regions. I was particularly interested to find that some aperiodic patterns are reversable, and some not – in other words, for some patterns, a unique generating rule can be inferred, but for others not. At least I think that’s the implication.
Has anyone else read it?
It’s what many scientists are accused of by those who condemn science as “evolutionary materialism” and “evolutionary materialism” with “atheism”.
But what is “reductionism” supposed to mean? Evolution News and Views has an article up today (h/t to bornagain77 at UD) that is a critique of an article on “neuroaesthetics” in PLOS biology.
The EnV article begins:
Evolutionary materialists must believe, at some level, that the experience of beauty can be reduced to actions of neurons in the brain
(my emphasis)
Well, I guess I’m an “evolutionary materialist”, and I’m also a neuroscientist. But I was also trained in the arts, and spent most of my life as a musician. Do I think that “the experience of beauty can be reduced to actions of neurons in the brain”?
During the recent debate with Gpuccio at one point he claimed was that it was my prior adoption of particular ideology or worldview that led me to exclude design as an explanation. Thus reducing our disagreement to a choice of worldviews. I am not sure I know what a worldview is – but scepticism falls far short of being an ideology. All it amounts to is the demand for strong evidence before believing anything. This is just an approach to evidence and is compatible with all sorts of beliefs about the nature of reality.
To take the particular issue of whether life is designed. Scepticism does not exclude design. It just asks that a design explanation is evaluated by the same standards as any other explanation. It is not sufficient that other explanations are considered to be inadequate. If you happen to believe in a designer with the appropriate powers and motivation then you may well accept that as the best explanation for life. If you happen to believe in a designer with evil motivations and sufficient power then that is a perfect explanation for natural disasters. But these are beliefs which need to be separately evaluated with their own evidence. You cannot use the fact that a designer is a good explanation for life as evidence for that designer.
A row is ready to erupt over two competing notions of ‘design in nature.’ One has been proposed under the auspices of being a natural-physical law. The other continues to clamour for public attention and respectability among natural-physical scientists, engineers and educators, but carries with it obvious religious overtones (Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Wedge Document and Dover trial 2005) and still has not achieved widespread scholarly support after almost 20 years of trying.
One the one hand is the Discovery Institute’s notion of ‘design in nature,’ which is repeated in various forms in the Intelligent Design movement. Here at TSZ many (the majority of?) people are against ID and ID proponents’ views of ‘design in nature.’ The author of this thread is likewise not an ID proponent, not an IDer. On the other hand is Duke University engineering and thermodynamics professor Adrian Bejan’s notion of ‘design in nature’ (Doubleday 2012, co-authored with journalism professor J. Peder Zane), which rejects Intelligent Design theory, but contends that ‘design’ is nevertheless a legitimate natural scientific concept. Apropos another recent thread here at TSZ, Bejan declares that his approach “solves one of the great riddles of science – design without a designer.”
Barry Arrington has started a new thread over at UD, where he argues that it is perfectly okay if CSI (complex specified information) cannot be quantified.
I responded, in a comment, that he seems to be making the case that CSI is not a scientific concept. It occurred to me that folk here might want to have a discussion on what is required of a concept, for it to be part of a scientific theory.
It seems to me that, at the very least, the concept has to be defined precisely enough that one can form testable hypotheses. Moreover, these hypotheses need to be testable by independent researchers, and the tests need to provide some kind of reliability (i.e. reasonable agreement between results obtained by independent researchers). Perhaps that’s weaker that quantifiable. However, I think even that weaker requirement is a problem for CSI, as it is currently “defined”.
The topic is open for discussion.
Cornelius Hunter has posted an odd argument:
Is there evidence for evolution? Sure, there is plenty of evidence for evolution. But there are significant problems with evolution. There is plenty of evidence for evolution just as there is plenty of evidence for geocentrism. But the science does not bode well for either theory.
So the evidence for evolution follows this general pattern: Even at its best, it does not prove evolution to be a fact. And furthermore, the evidence reveals substantial problems with evolution.
So how can evolutionists proclaim evolution to be a fact with such fervor? There seems to be a glaring mismatch between the evidence and the truth claims of evolutionists. The answer is that evolutionists use contrastive reasoning. Evolution is not claimed to be a fact based on how well it fits the evidence, but rather on how poorly the alternative fits the evidence. Evolution is proved by the process of elimination.
In other words, Hunter is arguing directly against Dembski:.
In eliminating chance and inferring design, specified complexity is not party to an argument from ignorance. Rather, it is underwriting an eliminative induction. Eliminative inductions argue for the truth of a proposition by actively refuting its competitors (and not, as in arguments from ignorance, by noting that the proposition has yet to be refuted)
A question has come up in another thread about the term “evidence”, and what qualifies (and does not qualify) as evidence. This particular debate has come about when Elizabeth said, in relation to an ongoing description of my model of “how things work” (free will/psychoplasm), said:
The problem it seems to me, with your model is that a) there is no evidence to support it whatsoever and b) we have a supported model that works pretty well.
I then challenged that assertion about the state of evidence with:
Can you support your assertion that “there is no evidence to support it whatsoever”?
She responded:
No, and I will qualify: I am aware of no evidence to support it, and I speak as one fairly well acquainted with the empirical literature.
Which I found odd, since I had given testimony (or, as Robin later said, “claimed”) that this model apparently worked well for me, others I know, and had in this thread and the Free Will thread pointed ouit various other similar doctrines that are chock full of such testimony (or “claims”). So, I asked:
So, my testimony, and that of others through various media, is not evidence?
Unfortunately, Elizabeth has yet to respond to that question. However, Robin contributed his/her answer:
No. Claims are never evidence of what is being claimed; they are solely evidence that someone made a claim. Why? Because anyone can make a mistake or even lie.
I think this deserves its own thread, for reasons I think will become clear. Before responding to Robin, though, I’d like for others to weigh in on the question of if testimony (not in the court sense, but in they typical “claim” sense), through various forms of media, is evidence.
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.
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.
In a recent comment, William J. Murray wrote:
Slightly off topic, but relevant
Well, let’s discuss that (all of that comment) here in a new topic where it won’t be off topic.
WJM began that comment with: Continue reading
Barry Arrington and StephenB at Uncommon Descent have frequently invoked “the rules of right reason” in their arguments.
Today, Barry posts them thus:
The Rules of Thought.
The rules of thought are the first principles of right reason. Those rules are:
- The Law of Identity: An object is the same as itself.
- The Law of Non-contradiction: Contradictory statements cannot both at the same time be true.
- The Law of the Excluded Middle: For any proposition, either that proposition is true or its negation is true.
And claims:
Note that the three laws of thought cannot be proven. They are either accepted as self-evident axioms – or not. The fundamental principles of right reason must be accepted as axioms for the simple reason that they cannot be demonstrated. There is no way to “argue for argument” and it is foolish to try to do so. If one’s goal in arguing is to arrive at the truth of a matter, arguing with a person who rejects the law of idenity is counterproductive, because he has rejected the very concept of “truth” as a meaningful category.
This seems to me fallacious. (heh.)
I don’t want to flood this place with items from Uncommon Descent, but as we have a certain overlap of members (and ex members!) and certainly a common set of interests, there’s a post up now that I found interesting, not because of the board politics (which we will not of course discuss…) but because of an odd equation I see there that I have caught a sniff of before and is here made explicit, both in the OP and in some of the comments.
Its the equivalence between “post modernism” and the provisional nature of scientific inferences.
Which I find extraordinary because it’s always seemed to me that science and postmodernism are on two opposite poles.