In a previous post here at TSZ Mark Frank asked why people doubt common descent.
A more interesting question is why did Charles Darwin doubt common descent?
Stephen Meyer has written two books which I think adequately answer both questions.
Those two books are:
In this thread I am willing to discuss either book, but I’d prefer to limit discussion to Meyer’s most recent book, Darwin’s Doubt
While Signature in the Cell concentrated on the origin of life, Darwin’s Doubt concentrates on the “Cambrian Explosion,” the sudden appearance of numerous distinct phyla and their subsequent diversification.
Neo-Darwinism offers no realistic account of origins, with the difference being that Darwinists can in the case of the origin of life assert that their theory does not apply while that excuse fails to apply to the appearance of different animals in the Cambrian and their subsequent diversification.
Just to prove I can – [Edited 09/15/2013]
Deleted from the OP – [Edited 09/201/2013] – Just to prove I can. “The arguments are the same for both:”
William,
The evidence overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that evolution is unguided.
It would certainly require a very odd kind of guidance to account for the data.
Well, Behe says AIDS and malaria are designed. I find that an odd sort of design.
Or even that Jesus guided some unspecified and unknown number of mutations …
I wonder which specific mutations the IDist will grant Jesus credit for.
I mean, clearly, the mutation which allowed Plasmodium to evade our immune system defenses would emphatically not count. That would be evil, not godly.
Neither would the sickle cell mutation, which allows malaria victims to escape the worst effects of that infection. Not an objectively good solution, compared to a Jesus-directed mutation: either strengthening our immune system against that parasite, or a mutation rendering that parasite non-infectious to humans.
What is so special about the small-at-the-time mutations which founded phyla during the Pre-Cambrian? What is so special about the mutation which founded the deuterostome clade? Why is that mutation so amazing that they see it as a Jesus-gets-credit example of?
Why is the Pre-Cambrian where IDiots like Stephen Meyer choose to take their stands?
I think it’s precisely because it’s so long ago that they can sidestep the moral implications of “Jesus guides every mutation”.
Cowards, every one of ’em.Cowards, almost all of ’em
edited based on petrushka’s info that Behe says malaria is designed.
Oh, that contradicts my idea that IDiots are all cowards in trying to avoid the moral implications of giving “credit” to their god for designing evil things like malaria.
Okay, I change my statement from “Cowards, all of ’em” to “Cowards, almost all of ’em”.
That part is true, because to vet them you just have to show that they fit the distribution of “random”–which isn’t actually completely random, in fact. It’s just random with respect to fitness.
One doesn’t have to vet that anything is “natural” in the sense of not being not supernatural. No one has given us any reason to think that the “supernatural” exists at all.
Utter bullshit. Since humans, the only “artificial” (in some senses) source of intervention, are clearly not involved (except incidentally) in “wild-type” selection, we don’t have to show that it’s “natural” at all. That is the default, just as “natural” is the default in the law. We don’t have to show that Santa Claus isn’t guiding evolution, nor that any other fictional being is not doing so.
You don’t know anything about science, or sound inference, just the bollocks coming from a bunch of IDiots.
It would be impossible to do science in the dishonest manner of the IDiots, since there’d always be logical “possibilities” that could derail a sound inference. Meteorology is possible without bothering with gods, same with biology.
Your fictions make no difference to honest science, and exist merely to thwart honest discovery in order to make space for your fantasies.
That’s because it’s simply assumed that we can ignore that which is without evidence, such as your “Designer.”
Only in evolutionary theory do people often have to make explicit the bases that go without saying in meteorology and physics. And that’s due to the vast dishonesty of creationists.
What is clear is that known mechanisms explain it so far as we can tell, hence there is no reason to suspect what pseudoscientists try to insert for ulterior reasons.
The fact is that you have no explanation for anything, let alone the fact that there is no intellectual similarity underlying many evolutionary adaptations, such as the flight capacities of pterosaurs, birds, and bats. Unless you can ever provide honest evidence, rather than meandering BS, for design in a meaningful sense (like being consistent with rationality), your apologetic tripe and baseless demands remain as vacuous as ever.
Glen Davidson
Yes, and it is your job to show that there is some kind of “artificial” that might explain things. We know of the “artificial” that is caused by humans, because we have seen both how they are causes and the effects of those causes.
Until and unless you manage to show evidence for an “artifice” that isn’t caused by humans, yet is capable of complex causation, such as manipulation of life, we have absolutely no reason even to consider such a vain proposition.
Glen Davidson
No, it’s not. I have made no such positive assertion.
Red herring. Nobody is talking about natural vs supernatural. I’ve stated repeatedly, and in the comment you were quoting, that it is natural vs artifice.
If you’re going to make a claim, you have to be able to support it. Nobody is asking you to disprove any other claim, but rather to support the positive claim you have made. You don’t get to shift the burden and claim “default” status.
Without any metric that can vet the claim, that is nothing but handwaving, belied by your earlier claim that you “don’t have to support” the assertion because you claim it as “default”.
Even if true, it is irrelevant.
keiths,
As usual, you utterly misrepresent what I say.
They are not scientific and are not meaningful unless there is a means by which one can discern between chance and artifice, natural and intentionally directed. That difference is both scientific and meaningful in other fields of investigation; there’s no good reason why it cannot be both scientific and meaningful with regards to evolution.
But, as it stands, at least we are agreed that the qualifiers “chance” or “random” and “natural” have no scientifically valid reason for being involved in the theory of evolution. They are ideologically-charged adjectives, nothing more.
You’ve made plenty of positive assertions that we have to care about some baseless fiction.
If we have to do that, we need actual evidence for such a claim. Your ignorant assertions do not oblige us.
Glen Davidson
What term do you suggest should replace them then?
William,
May I ask you a question?
Do you believe there can be such a thing as a “fair dice”?
That is, when thrown each face has an equal chance of appearing?
If so, how would determine that it is fair?
If not, why not?
There is a means William and Darwin spelled it out. Either humans direct breeding, in which case the selection is artificial, or there is no human involvement, in which case the selection is nature. It’s that simple. And since NO OTHER TOOL DESIGNING INTELLIGENCES have ever been even indirectly supported through evidence, they are not considered. Period.
It is true, and it is only irrelevant in the scope of the argument you are having.
It is, however, a fair observation in regard to the larger ID context. What, in fact, does ID explain?
ID, in todays incarnation here, seeks refuge in mutations that appear to be random wrt fitness not really being random, at least not to the satisfaction of William. How trivial. Instead of showing that they are not from actual data, he’s arguing it data-free based on what fundamentally is a semantic issue. If you can’t say random because things might be pre-determined, better prove things are pre-determined so we can all change the language to suit. (thinking about it, we’d do that anyway!).
If William is so concerned with things that need correction, perhaps KF’s (ab)use of mathematics to prove each comment has FSCO/I (but never mentions a specific figure) could do with some attention?
If such “unspoken” (so William thinks”) trade secrets are so important as targets I suggest ID offers many more suitable targets.
Well, the thing is with scientific terms is that they need “operational definitions” – any term can be used, as long as it is precisely defined in the context of the argument. “Natural” can have a scientific meaning – for instance it might be used as in “naturally occurring” to distinguish something from something that has been made by human beings.
Chance is not often used, certainly in the fields I am familiar with.
Random, however, is in regular use. It doesn’t usually mean “non-intentional” though, which is a meaning often given to it in ordinary English, nor does it usually mean “drawn from an equiprobable distribution” which is another term often given to it, although it might mean that in a given context. It often means “not-modelled”. Sometimes it means “drawn blindly from a distribution X” where X is a probability distribution. Sometimes it means “orthogonal to X”, meaning that any relationship with X is fortuitous and unpredictable.
No, the fact is that you don’t posit a natural artificer, nor do we have any evidence of one. Not being stupid, we also know what ID is about–dishonesty and the supernatural.
And I went on to speak of fictional entities. I don’t really care whether you’re blathering on about “supernatural” beings or what-not, so long as you’re implying that we have to be concerned about fictional entities.
We do, and you just ignore it.
We make claims based upon the given evidence. That’s it, that’s the honest thing to do, not worrying about your ignorance and false assertions.
No one’s trying to shift the burden except you, as you claim that we have to provide evidence that something doesn’t occur, even though you provide no evidence that such a thing does occur.
We only have to base our conclusions upon the facts. That’s what we do.
More belying on your part. We don’t have to support the claim to reality against non-reality. That’s in essence what I wrote, while you merely repeat your ignorance.
Only if you were providing an honest portrayal of these matters. You are not, you’re claiming–based on your continual ignorance of what inference entails–that we haven’t supplied the evidence, when we have.
This again:
Instead of providing an explanation, as science clearly does (IDiot nonsense notwithstanding), you just repeat your bogus “science standards,” while failing to support your many incorrect assertions.
It remains the fact that no one has to, or does, show that “artifice” is not involved in the non-human world in any science, evolutionary science being no exception. Another fact is that you’re stating highly untrue claims, with no evidence to back these up, the usual for creationists.
Glen Davidson
That’s a neat trick co-opting a scientific question and turning it into nonsense and then making science liable for the new statement.
Neo darwinism is simply the modern study of evolution of species. It is modern because it integrates modern information gathered during the course of the investigation. If at some point, evidence of an intelligent designer turned up, then that would be neo darwinism too. Because it would be scientific in its description. It would not give preference to ancient mythologies as potential hypotheses because it would be following the scientific method and to some degree utilizing the ideas of falsification and risky predictions. On those counts, the ancient mythologies have long ago failed. Not that they have no worth, just that that worth isn’t in their descriptions of natural processes.
Elizabeth:
Remind us again how you have a model of unguided processes and how “the data” fits that model precisely? Weren’t you recently over at UD arguing the exact opposite?
Looks like neither Mung nor any of the other ID-Creationists is willing to explain how Meyer’s “the Designer did it 535 million years ago!!” claim fits in with the other 3 1/2 billion years’ history of life on the Earth.
Not surprising. I’ve never known an IDCer with the sack to commit to a position they’ll have to actually support with evidence.
Exact opposite of what?
Exact opposite of “have a model”?
Exact opposite of “unguided process”?
Exact opposite of “precisely”?
Please be more clear in your language, Mung.
William,
As usual, you make a false accusation in hopes of diverting attention away from your error.
Here is your mistake, in your own words:
What’s especially funny is that CSI itself — the very archetype of an ID metric — proves you wrong. Dembski freely admits that the CSI criterion can produce false negatives. That means that while Dembski sees the presence of CSI as a definite indicator of design, its absence is not a definite indicator of “chance & natural causes”. If it’s not already obvious, then draw yourself a Venn diagram.
ID and “chance & natural causes” are not necessarily two sides of the same metric. Your statement is simply wrong.
Meanwhile, I’m challenging another claim of yours:
The evidence overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that evolution is unguided.
Oh, just look up any textbook on evolutionary biology, Mung. The modern evolutionary model fits the data very well, and does not invoke external guidance.
It’s not the theory that evolution was unguided, it is merely a theory that does not invoke external guidance.
If
Because there can be diagnostically gray areas produced by any such metric is irrelevant to the fact that such a metric is both dichotomous and necessary in order to make any claims whatsoever about the probability of sufficient explanation, and the probability of necessary explanation, of either side of the coin wrt any particular phenomena.
That there can be false positives and false negatives is irrelevant. Nobody claimed that any metric could make “definite” or absolute demarcations. This is entirely your misrepresentation and straw man.
William,
You did:
What you argue in that thread is that the evidence indicates that whatever generated diversity in biology, that diversity was distributed via common descent. As far as I can tell, you make no argument in your OP that the engines of diversity (not the distributive method afterward) were properly (scientifically) characterized as “chance” mutations and “natural” selection.
All you are doing here is grandstanding with the hope that no one actually reads what you link to or takes the time to examine your rhetorical claims and mischaracterizations.
Perhaps you’d care to demonstrate the usage of FSCO/I then your claims of probability of sufficient explanation can be examined in light of that example?
In the non-ID world this would be a perfectly reasonable request. You, of course, will simply ignore it.
No, I didn’t. That is your incorrect inference. Nowhere did I claim any exact demarcation was possible. Not even ID theory – as you’ve pointed out – proposes any such absolute or exact means. Just because an arbiting metric is required and is dichotomous doesn’t mean that arbiting metric must be precise or absolute. There is always the capacity for false positives, negatives, gray areas and error.
You have a habit of arguing against your erroneous interpretations long after I’ve corrected them.
wrong place
False dichotomy. There could be other intelligences besides human that could use artifice to generate selection.
First, in order to determine if the evidence indirectly supports intelligence (human or not), one would require a metric for making such an inference to best explanation. Darwinists do not have a means for making such an abductive assessment, nor have they tried to formulate such a metric (since they were already ideologically certain of the outcome), other than by making philosophical arguments that amount to “if there was a god, god wouldn’t do it that way”.
So your claim that there is no indirect evidence for intelligent selection is disingenuous at best because Darwinists haven’t even tried to find such evidence.
At worst, your claim is dishonest when in fact Darwinists must tell themselves to turn a blind eye to the prima facie evidence for design, as per Lewontin:
… and per Dawkins:
… and per Darwin:
… and per Denton:
It’s hard to see any indirect evidence for design when one has purposefully put on ideological blinders and is deliberately ignoring such evidence, and when one refuses to sift through data in any way that might be useful in making such an inference.
“Variation” or “mutation” and “survival differential”, which are ideologically neutral terms. The term “selection” carries with it an assumption of artifice to some degree.
There may never be an answer to “why” any designer generated something the way they did in the manner they did and for what purpose. This isn’t an argument about how (functional capabilities and limitations) or why (motivations), but rather only if design is necessary or unnecessary to explain the particular outcome in question, which in this case would be the rapid appearance of full sets of major body-plans in the Cambrian.
If design is found to be necessary to that particular case, how it was achieved, or why it happened when it did might be interesting questions, but they would be irrelevant to the finding of design in this case.
The tree does not itself show how it was shaped, true. But the fact that there is a tree indicates that it was constructed via generational modification – it indicates a genetic continuum. If your designer was involved, he performed the task by steady amendment of existing forms, with bifurcation. And took about 4 billion years over it. And acted in ways indistinguishable from the known ‘natural’ processes of mutation, recombination, isolation, drift and selection.
Your hope that the mutations didn’t really happen by ‘chance’, and the selection wasn’t ‘natural’, is all very nice; one certainly cannot go back in time to demonstrate either that they were or they weren’t. It is certainly possible that every step is guided by God who just makes his actions look like physics. Or that some are guided by God and others just happened ‘naturally’. Or that they all act without guidance. How do you distinguish these possibilities without just guessing?
Reduced to quote mining now? For shame!
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.”
Darwin was arguing against relying on one’s first instincts – not insisting that one ‘turn a blind eye’, but suggesting we open them wider.
The problem is that such process are not “known” to be “natural” or “by chance”, because Darwinists admit (and strongly assert) that there is no metric by which such a claim could be certified. So, you have no means by which to claim what natural and chance processes “would look like”, except by assuming that the path of diversity we find was produced by it. You are assuming your consequent in claiming that “my designer” made it look just like what it would look like under “natural and chance” mechanisms and processes. For all you know, “natural and chance” mechanisms can provide nothing but a sterile world without any life whatsoever, and would quickly kill off anything resembling a self-replicating cell.
Also, punctuated equilibrium, the Cambrian Explosion and orfan genes challenge your claim of a “genetic continuum” and “steady amendment of existing forms”.
I’ve expressed no such hope here. What I have challenged is the scientifically improper characterization of variation as “chance”, and survival differential as “natural” selection by Darwinists when they have provided no metric or means by which to support such characterizations.
If we assume that by “god” you mean ID, then if you cannot discern via some metric what is best characterized as “chance” and “natural” (as opposed to guided by intelligence and artifice), you have no business characterizing your mechanisms either way.
Right or wrong, at least ID proponents have offered a metric by which such characterizations might be arrived at scientifically (whether actually valid or not); Darwinists haven’t even attempted it, but are instead satisfied to simply assume their ideological assertions are true without putting them to any test whatsoever.
Allan Miller,
Your charge of “quote mining” is erroneous or just dishonest. You must take into account what I was using the quoted portion to support. The larger quote you offered doesn’t undermine or change what argument I used the quote to support in the first place.
Your expanded quote doesn’t change the fact that the prima facie evidence (and thus, at least to some degree, indirect) is that the eye appears to be designed. That doesn’t mean that our “at first glance” impression is true, but to claim there is no indirect evidence (which Robin claimed) of design is absurd. It would be absurd to claim that the apparent movement of the sun through the sky is not prima facie, or indirect evidence, that the sun actually moves in a path through the sky – even if that view, ultimately, proves to be false.
What do you think Darwin would say of the finely-tuned, code-orchestrated, integrated nanotechnology we have found in every living cell? Do you think Darwin would have found it to be, to some degree, even if ultimately incorrect, evidence of design? If he had trouble with the eye from what he knew of it at the time, imagine how he would have reacted to an eye where every cell of the eye is full of integrated, code-driven nanotechnology operating at incredible speeds and with incredible precision.
Inasmuch as this makes any sense in terms, it is self-contradictory. A “metric” – a measure – that produces “diagnostically gray areas” is not, by definition, a “dichotomous” metric.
A dichotomous metric won’t output a probability. More to the point, nobody on the “evolution” “side” is claiming that we have a “sufficient” model. No models in science are “sufficient”. What we do instead is to compare models in terms of how much of the data they explain.
Pretty well all diagnostic discriminators will produce both false positives and false negatives. That’s not a problem. The problem with CSI is that it can’t be computed without assuming your conclusion.
why is it a more interesting question why darwin might have doubted? He would have been a pretty poor scientist if he didn’t doubt his brand new hypothesis which overturned about 90% of stuff we sort of believed already.
I think a more interesting question is why is it considered a basically settled matter now.
There is no way of knowing what he would have thought, as if he had known what we know now, he would have necessarily known a lot of other things as well.
And we still don’t know how the RNA-DNA-protein cell-system came about. However, given a such a system, and possibly a forbear of such a system, evolution by the means he proposed, becomes eminently possible, because they enable self-replication with heritable variance in reproductive success.
No, it’s not self-contradictory. What the metric is attempting to measure is a dichotomous commodity. You’re conflating the metric with the commodity. That the metric cannot precisely determine which of the dichotomous commodities is responsible doesn’t change the fact that it is a valid dichotomous metric.
Sure it can, as long as the probabilities generated are of dichotomous commodities.
Patently false. Several people have done so in this thread alone.
Even if true, irrelevant to the point that at least ID advocates are trying to provide a metric, while Darwinists are satisfied with their de facto ideological assertions.
There’s simply no way to support this assertion without a means of discerning the limits and realistic capabilities of the “means proposed” via an appropriate metric. One cannot observe that any survival differential is “natural”, and not via artifice, nor can characterize the means of variation as natural or “by chance”. One can only make such a determination via a valid, arbiting metric.
You are still missing my point here. I am NOT SAYING that we can demonstrate that differential survival or variation is “not via artifice”. I’m saying that we cannot demonstrate that. It is not methodologically possible.
I’m saying that we CAN demonstrate that differential survival resulting from heritable variance in reproductive success, where that variance is orthogonal to the likelihood of success (in other words a variant that promotes success is no more probable than one that doesn’t, and indeed the reverse will be true in an optimised population), CAN produce the kind of adaptation we observe, and that this process, coupled with drift and sometimes physical isolation, can result in a population splitting into two and evolving down separate lineages.
In other words, the model fits the observations pretty well.
That’s all we can do in science – produce models that fit the observations. We cannot rule out jiggery-pokery by some unspecified intentional agent with unspecified powers and unspecified intentional powers.
If they don’t claim to have a sufficient model, why is it called a “fact”? Are models that are regarded to be insufficient explanations of particular phenomena regularly referred to as scientific “facts”?
How possible? Can you provide me a mathematical probability? Is “eminently” a scientific or mathematical term here? Or perhaps its just ideological rhetoric? Please show me (mathematically) how “eminently possible” is different from “bare possibility”. Certainly you have a metric that wold provide a solid distinction?
I’m not “missing” your point. Your point is, as usual, entirely irrelevant to my argument.
If you strip “the model” of the terms “chance” or “random” and “natural”, then I agree, the model fits the observations pretty well, with the caveat that there are some facts that do not fit that model “pretty well”.
But that is not “the model” being debated.
Well, in that case, say what you mean. You said:
Now you are saying that the gray areas are in reality (i.e. not “produced by [the] metric”). For someone who complains so frequently about being misunderstood, you write pretty unclearly.
OK.
Yes indeed. That’s why we use logistic regression.
Well, I haven’t seen such claims, and I am not making such a claim. To claim that a scientific model is “sufficient” would be an unscientific claim. No models are, or can be, “sufficient”. At the very minimum, there is always measurement error.
I am making no ideological assertions, and the number of “Darwinists” who actually assert that evolution means there can be no ID is, to my knowledge, zero.
As for a “metric” – “Darwinists” have countless “metrics” that ID proponents routinely ignore. For a start, I never ever see any reference to the statistical tests used to test tree solutions in phylogenetic analyses. Those are metrics that actually measure the probability of observing the data, should the tree be false. And that’s just one. Virtually every empirical evolutionary paper published comes with p values and confidence intervals.
Valid ones. The ID “metrics” are simply cargo cult simulacra, that measure nothing, and tell you nothing. Dembski’s version simply returns what you assumed when you wrote down the equation and filled in the blanks, and the variants mostly simply allow us to reject a null that nobody is proposing anyway.
In that case I your argument is totally opaque to me.