… I wonder if I could interest you in a little thought experiment, in the form of four simple questions:
1. Is it possible that we could discover an artifact on Mars that would prove the existence of extraterrestrials, without the presence or remains of the extraterrestrials themselves?
2. If yes, exactly what kind of artifact would suffice? Car? House? Writing? Complex device? Take your pick.
3. Explain rationally why the existence of this artifact would convince you of the existence of extraterrestrials.
4. Would that explanation be scientifically sound?
I would assert the following:
a. If you answer “Yes” to Question 4, then to deny ID is valid scientific methodology is nothing short of doublethink. You are saying that a rule that holds on Mars does not hold on Earth. How can that be right?
b. If you can answer Question 3 while answering “No” to Question 4, then you are admitting that methodological naturalism/materialism is not always a reliable source of truth.
c. If you support the idea that methodological naturalism/materialism is equivalent to rational thought, then you are obligated to answer “No” to Question 1.
Well, I can never resist a thought experiment, and this one seems quite enlightening….
1. Is it possible that we could discover an artifact on Mars that would prove the existence of extraterrestrials, without the presence or remains of the extraterrestrials themselves?
Yes. Well, strongly suggest, rather than prove. We don’t prove things in science.
2. If yes, exactly what kind of artifact would suffice? Car? House? Writing? Complex device? Take your pick.
Anything that looked like it was supposed to be for something. I take it that the thing doesn’t reproduce, because if it did, we’d be in the presence of an extraterrestrial.
3. Explain rationally why the existence of this artifact would convince you of the existence of extraterrestrials.
Well, if a thing looks like it was made for some purpose – maybe stones with a sharp edge, with no apparent non-intelligent mechanism for shaping them, or something with a regular shape (a rectangular polished monolith, for instance), again with no apparent non-intelligent mechanism for producing such a thing (crystalisation, for instance), or an intricate systematic pattern and movable parts (like the Antikythara Mechanism), then it would be reasonable to assume that some intelligent purposive agent made it to serve some purpose.
4. Would that explanation be scientifically sound?
Yes, I think so. It would involve generating hypotheses and testing them, including hypotheses about the possible function of the object, and what purpose it might serve its putative designer.
I would assert the following:
a. If you answer “Yes” to Question 4, then to deny ID is valid scientific methodology is nothing short of doublethink. You are saying that a rule that holds on Mars does not hold on Earth. How can that be right?
Well there are perfectly valid methodologies for inferring design from the presence of a non-reproducing object that appears to have been made to serve some extraneous purpose even if that purpose is obscure. And some aspects of ID methodology are relevant – if the thing seems to have some specialness about its form, yet does not itself reproduce, nor does it appear to be the result of some iterative process, such as crystallisation, or deposition, or indeed chemistry, than that might be a design indicator. Where ID methodology is invalid is in dismissing evolution as such an iterative process. It’s perfectly possible that self-reproducing things could be designed by external designers (though it’s not obvious that those designers could themselves be non-self-reproducing), but it’s not obvious that they have to be, which was Darwin’s point. And in any case, here we are not talking about a self-reproducing thing.
b. If you can answer Question 3 while answering “No” to Question 4, then you are admitting that methodological naturalism/materialism is not always a reliable source of truth.
Not at all. Scientific methodology (which is, by definition, naturalist) is perfectly capable of detecting design, with reasonable reliability, even in the absence of the designer.
c. If you support the idea that methodological naturalism/materialism is equivalent to rational thought, then you are obligated to answer “No” to Question 1.
Well, no, because there’s nothing in naturalism/materialism that prevents us from making a perfectly valid design inference. The issue, and I do wish ID proponents would get this, is not that inferring design is in principle non-scientific (forensic scientists and archaeologists do it all the time), but that the method that ID proponents use to infer design from biology is invalid – becauses they fail to take into account (or, if they do, do not specify how, or underestimate) the power of iterative mechanisms to produce entities with features that serve their own perpetuation.
OK, let me put this slightly differently, because I see how this could look as though (although I don’t think it is) I am assuming my conclusion.
When I say “we can explain the diversity and complexity of life” by Darwinian mechanisms, I am not saying that every instance of diversity and complexity has a complete and detailed Darwinian explanation (“this mutated to produce that, which was selected because of the other”). What I’m saying is that we have a perfectly good mechanisms by which diversity and complexity can emerge from a less diverse, less complex starting population. Most IDists (and almost all creationists) accept this, although they claim there are “limits” to what such a mechanism can produce. I am not persuaded that there are limits, but I am not claiming there are not. Often things turn out to be more complicated than we think, and Darwinian mechanisms themselves are no exception. The point I was trying to make is one that is frequently (increasingly frequently!) made in ID circles, that self-replication itself is not accounted for. And clearly we cannot explain self-replication by an appeal to self-replication. That really would be assuming the consequent. It is also claimed that even if we could account for the emergence of self-replicators from non-self-replicators, we still won’t have shown how those got from whatever crude beginnings they had (maybe peptides, maybe RNA, maybe enclosed in lipid vesicles, maybe reliant on convection currents for metabolism) to modern life, with a DNA-tRNA-ribosome-protein synthesis system.
hmm. That is slightly garbled, and depends on what exactly you mean. Oddly enough, science doesn’t generally proceed by falsification – or rather, what we falsify, in science, is the null hypothesis, which is rather boring. So what “Darwinistic processes are plausibly capable of generating any particular feature in any particular stretch of time” is not what would normally be set up as falsifiable hypothesis. What you might falsify (and Nick Matzke’s work on the bacterial flagellum is a good example is the null hypothesis that “Darwinistic processes are not plausibly capable of generating a bacterial flagellum in the amount of time available”. And I think this is a really crucial point, and the cause of a huge amount of misunderstanding between ID proponents and opponents. Indeed it is crucial to what I consider the fundamental flaw in Dembski’s argument (which is based on null hypothesis testing). There are basically two kinds of hypothesis testing in regular use in science: one is null hypothesis testing, in which you seek to falsify the null, and Bayesian model comparison, in which you seek to find which of two alternative models is the more likely. Oddly, the second is more apt for ID purposes, but it’s the first that Dembski has tied his banner to!
I think you are absolutely right that the two “camps” as it were, use the same terminology to mean very different things, and indeed, regularly misunderstand each other’s claims as a result. Yes, I think IDists use the phrase “Darwinian” as a placeholder for “non-intelligent” (which I think is an error made by Darwinists too – I don’t actually think that Darwinian processes are particularly “unintelligent” depending your definition of “intelligent” – I do think they are “unintentional” which is a little different). And I also agree that they further denote Darwinian processes as “Chance and Necessity”, which has a perfectly good pedigree, with Monod, but contains a few cans of worms.
This is what it seems to me you think I am saying:
And you think this is fallacious because it unpacks as:
Which would indeed be fallacious.
What we are in fact saying (or I am, anyway) is:
To which a reasonable counter-argument might be either (or both):
or
As internet posters we take shortcuts in arguments.
“Having no reason to infer a designer” is a restatement of Occam’s Razor. It’s a rule of thumb.
I find it interesting that ID advocates often favor Wallace over Darwin, but Wallace’s paper was entitled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type.”
I note the word “indefinitely” is used rather than “within baramin.”
When ID “accounts” for the origin of self-replicators with an account other then “they were designed” then please, somebody wake me up.
Until then I’ll continue to bte on actual scientists doing actual research.
I only inserted “physical” as only a “physical” designer is likely to leave traces other than the artefact itself. A bodiless designer wouldn’t. I was just being meticulous.
There is some confusion here. No, we don’t know that the environment on early earthy was inhospitable to the generation of life – that’s the question that needs to be addressed. What we do know that, designed or not, the first life appeared in the conditions of early earth! Which was (I hope you agree) over three billion years ago. What we assume is that IF life spontaneously emerged on early earth, it MUST have done so under those conditions, so there isn’t any point in researching the possibility that life could emerge under conditions that DIDN’T pertain on early earth. We do, however, know that life as we know it today would find early earth very inhospitable.
As for your statement: “virtually all species that ever lived been killed off by natural selection” – no. Most lineages have died out, not due to “natural selection”, but through failure to adapt to a changing environment (not the same thing).
Well, the hypotheses are far from “bare” but they are certainly not complete. I’m not sure how you are distinguishing a hypothesis from a “just so story”. Can you explain what you see as the difference?
Well, not in my view. I don’t think living things look like the products of human design (the only designed things we know of, unless you count beaver dams or birds nests, or chimp ant-poking-sticks, but they look even less like living things). For as start, only very recently have humans even begun to make things that in any sense self-replicate, and those only in silico. Perhaps one day we will make a 3D printer that makes 3D printers, but that will still be a long way short of a self-sustaining man-made organism. On the other hand what characterises living things are the very features that make evolution possible, and what we observe are exactly the lineage patterns (nested hierarchies) that bespeak evolution down lineages, not overseen design. We constantly see wheels being reinvented, not reused. Why? Makes perfect sense if we assume evolution, very little if we assume a designer with anything like human characteristics. And, I repeat: human designers are the only designers of designed-looking things.
Sure. But just because the word is used doesn’t mean we think it indicates a designer. It’s a perfectly good metaphor for the processes of evolution, which in many ways DO work like human design (iterative prototyping, rejection of less good design in favour of bettter) except for the non-reuse of components developed down one lineage in another. In other words: in all respects in which Darwinian processes do resemble human design processes, living things look like human designs; but in al lrespects in which Darwinian process do not resemble human design processes, living things look like the product of the former rather than the latter.
Patrick,
There’s nothing wrong with default arguments per se, as long as the categories are exhaustive and the tests are reliable.
For example, the rationals and the irrationals exhaust the space of the reals. If I have a reliable test for rationals, and if a real number x fails the test, then I can conclude by default that x is irrational.
The problem with the Explanatory Filter is not that design is the default. It’s not that intelligent and unintelligent causes taken together aren’t exhaustive (there are some subtleties involved in classification, but they don’t affect the fact that the union of those two sets, properly defined, is exhaustive). The problem is that IDers don’t have a reliable test for “X could have been produced by undirected natural causes”.
The tests they do offer commit the Hoyle Fallacy or otherwise understate the power of Darwinian processes. If they did have a reliable test that worked when applied to biological examples, then the EF would be a valid procedure.
I submit that if we found a Stonehenge-like site on Mars, we could conclude that it was designed without making any assumptions about the designers (beyond mere capability, of course). We could observe that a) it is not explicable by known geological processes, and b) that unknown physical processes are unlikely to hew rectangular stone blocks of roughly equal size and prop them up vertically in intricate arrangements that are aligned with celestial phenomena. Being unable to explain MarsHenge in terms of unintelligent causes, we could conclude that it was designed, despite making no assumptions about the nature or intentions of the designers.
How do you know those mechanisms are Darwinian (chance & necessity as causal categories)?
William J. Murray writes:
William,
You seem to be misunderstanding the ‘bad design’ arguments. The people making those arguments aren’t claiming that “X seems to be designed, but it can’t be, because if it were then it would point to a bad or evil designer.”
They are saying instead that “We don’t think X is designed, because it can be explained by evolution. But even if we were to grant that it was designed, that wouldn’t help most ID proponents, since they believe the designer is their all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly loving God.”
And that’s true. The recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, for example, doesn’t look at all like the work of an all-knowing designer — unless we posit one who is determined to make his handiwork appear as evolution-like as possible.
It’s not that the design is defective as that it looks evolved.
How can you tell if there is a reason, or not a reason, to infer a designer?
If there’s no need there’s no reason.
How do you know if there is a need for a designer or not?
petrushka,
Design is beyond evolution matters. Its about the great complexity of biology.
Thats the point in this thread.
its all about a articulate and winning way to demonstrate why sucj well organized andc well ordered operations of things demands the first and surely only conclusion that a thinking being is behind it all.
things bumping together with no intent but creating great order and complexity should be a extreme conclusion.
We wouldn’t say it about things found on other planets where we are seeking intelligent life .
Robert Byers,
I just saw this ridiculous comment of yours at UD:
I’m glad to see that ForJah, Eric Anderson and Upright Biped promptly called you on it.
keiths,
Really, someone at UD finally did a decent thing and called out one of their own for his bad conduct? What is the world coming to!
And really, three someones at UD finally said something decent? Must be a sign of the end times.
You’ve decided that there is. Why is there a need for a designer?
Chance is not a causal category. Nor really is “necessity”. Saying something happened because it had to happen isn’t explaining how or why it happened.
The Darwinian mechanism, on the other hand, is a very precise hypothesis regarding how and why populations evolve. It makes testable predictions, and those predictions, if confirmed (as they are, regularly) support the hypothesis.
At its most basic it proposes that when organisms reproduce, their offspring vary slightly from their parents in ways that they then pass on to their own offspring, so that all populations contain a lot of small heritable variations. Those variations that tend to lead to larger numbers of viable offspring will clearly become more prevalent, while those variations that tend to produce smaller numbers of vialbe offspring will tend to become less prevalent.
And since Darwin’s day, we have discovered the mechanism of inheritance, and that it lends itself very well to small variation during replication; we’ve discovered that small variations in DNA can result in substantial variations to the actual organism, and quite a lot about why; we’ve observed populations evolve in the lab and the field; the mechanism has been reproduced in computer models and is quite amazingly effective at discovering solutions to problems; we’ve identifed specific variants associated with specific advantageous traits; we have extremely well-fitting hypothetical lineages that support common descent, which, with some important exceptions, fit genetic lineages; we have discovered mechanisms for the exceptions (horizontal gene transfer) which also fit the data extremely well; we are continually turning up predicted transitional fossils (fossils with features of both later and earlier organisms, not creatures that actually were ancestral to later populations); and we continually observe features that make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective, but not from an intentional designer’s perspective (the giraffe’s laryngeal nerve being a prime example) – an abundance of retrofits and a glaring omission of wholesale transfer of a solution from one lineage to another.
But sure, the picture is not at all complete, even in principle. We are only scratching the surface of the different ways in which novelty is generated, and discovering some mechanisms by which particularly fruitful mechanisms of novelty generation seem to have been themselves selected at population level – the “evolution of evolvability”. And of course we still do not know how DNA itself came about, nor how the first self-replicators emerged (assuming they did) from non-self-replicators. And we may never know. But that won’t stop scientists from generating testable hypotheses, some of which will be supported.
And nor should it.
You don’t. There might be a need for a blue teapot, for all we know.
This is the point that seems so hard to get across: we have an explanandum: biological organisms that reproduce themselves and have many amazing features that help them reproduce themselves.
We have two posited explanations:
1.Populations of things that reproduce themselves will tend to evolve many amazing features that help them reproduce themselves, because any heritable feature that helps them reproduce themselves will tend to become prevalent in the population.
2.A designer designed them that way.
Both are possible. We have lots of evidence for the first, and indeed it is simple logic. We have no evidence for the second.
Why infer the second?
When you say these kinds of things, I start thinking that you’re really not serious about a debate. Why offer such a dismissive, inappropriate analogy?
Have most scientists stated that biological features have the appearance of a blue teapot? Of course not.
Does the term “Darwinism”, in the spirit of how it is being argued here, mean “no blue teapots necessary for the explanation”? Of course not.
Is “blue teapot-ness” considered one of the three fundamental causal categories – chance, necessity, and blue-teapotness? Of course not.
But, that is not what you said; you said you have Darwinian mechanisms which explain. What I asked you, and ask you again, is: “How do you know those processes are Darwinian – confined to the causal categories of chance and necessity?”
You have made a strong, positive assertion about the causal category nature of the processes you claim are sufficient as explandum; support it or withdraw it.
That is the point that **you** keep missing. This isn’t an argument about whether or not the processes produce X, but rather about whether or not chance & necessity are sufficient as categorical kinds of processes. Humans intelligently employ physical processes to generate things that cannot be generated without artifice (intention/intelligence), just because you can describe a human in terms of physical processes doesn’t mean Darwinism (chance & necessity) are sufficient explanations for what humans produce. There is a difference between a description and an explanation.
My question is: how do you know they are Darwinian in nature? Please do not avoid the answer with something so inappropriately trivial as your “blue teapot” response.
How do you know you have no evidence for the second?
A list of questions:
1. How do you know that “Darwinism” (chance and necessity causal categories) is a sufficient explanation for what evolutionary processes produce? Please, no “blue teapot” diversions.
2. How do you vet your processes as “Darwinian” in nature?
3. How do you know that the biological processes you are examining are not evidence of a designer, if you have not vetted your characterization of them as “Darwinian”?
Darwinism, as I’ve explained, **means”* – to IDists – the causal categories of chance and necessity. In terms of this discussion, if you don’t hold those as categories of causation along with “artifice”, then – in terms of this discussion – you have no means by which to claim that “Darwinian” processes are an explanation of anything.
IOW, IF there’s no way to vet mutations as “random”, selection as “natural”, or evolutionary processes as “unintelligent”; THEN there’s no way to claim that unintelligent/unintentional processes are a sufficient explanation.
That’s called “shifting the burden”.
The burden is on you because you have not demonstrated the existence of any agent capable of biological design. Until you do that, the best explanation is the process we can observe.
Sorry, William. It was a rhetorical device, intended to make the point that I am having difficulty in communicating, namely that inferring something from a gap is a very weak inference.
In addition to the other point I don’t seem to be communicating to you, that biological features “have the appearance of design” is not an observation but a hypothesis about their origin. You are conflating explanation with explanandum.
But nor are “chance, necessity and design” unless you are an IDist. In which case you would be mistaken 🙂
oops. “explanandum” = “that which must be explained”. Perhaps re-read my post with that definition in mind?
And I do not regard (as I said above) that “chance and necessity” are causal explanations at all.
Here is what I said:
Feel free to disagree, but please note that that is my position. And I explained quite clearly why I think that Darwinian mechanisms are a good explanation for what we observe (but not of course for the existence of Darwinian-capable self-replicators in the first place).
Chance and necessity aren’t kinds of processes at all, in my view.
I would agree that some things cannot be generated without an intentional agent (i.e. an agent who is able to conceive of some goal, and do stuff that helps bring out that goal). Human artefacts come into this category. Pots do not make pots, nor battleships, battleships, nor robots, robots, nor alarm clocks, alarm clocks. They can only be generated by a human who wants a pot, battleship, robot, or alarm clocke.
But biological organisms are regularly generated without an intentional agent – babies are born unintentionally, plants cast seeds unintentionally, bacteria divide unintentionally.
In fact every single organism we observe was generated by another organism, and although some of those are intelligent, not all are, and not all procreate intentionally (i.e. procreate with the goal of procreating in mind). So if we are going to claim that living organisms were generated intentionally, we need to ask: by whom, how, and with what intention?
At this point, most ID proponents say: “but we don’t have to answer that – the thing looks designed, therefore most likely it was designed”. Even though its generation bears absolutely no resemblance to any design process ever observed, there is no trace of any designer, any tools the designer might have used, or any apparent purpose the artefact might have served the designer.
I don’t. I proposed two hypotheses, a Darwinian one and a Non-darwinian one. The Darwinian one fits the data, and is actually explanatory. The non-darwinian one does not make any prediction that can be confirmed or infirmed, and requires that I posit an entity for which I have no independent evidence.
Because I don’t. Do you? (By “independent” I mean independent of the phenomenon we are seeking to explain, which I referred to as the explanandum – perhaps clearing up the meaning of that word will help).
I don’t think either are explanations for what evolutionary processes produce.
By deriving testable hypotheses, i.e. hypotheses that make testable predictions, and testing them.
Because that would be incoherent. A thing cannot be evidence for itself. You need to sort out and separate what you are attempting to explain from the possible explanations for it. You can’t start by saying “this thing looks designed, therefore that is evidence that it was designed”. That is conflating, as I sais, explandum with explanation.
Then IDists need to come up with a different term for chance and necessity. Darwinian mechanisms are reproduction with variation and selection. Don’t equivocate by labeling Lizzie’s explanations with a term that (to you) doesn’t fit them.
Of course I do. The fact that ID proponents means, to IDists, something I consider incoherent is not a problem for me, but for IDists. I do not regard chance and necessity as causal categories. I think that “chance”, “necessity” and “design” belong to quite different categories of concept.
Here is my view:
Chance, is, essentially, processes that we have not modelled. If we say: the rain made this piece of ground wet – we have named a process as responsible for an observed phenomenon. But let’s say the shower was very light (as has just happened – I went to check on the grass I sowed on Monday): but why did this particular seed get wet, but that piece stayed dry, I could say “chance” – it just happend to have one of the few drops land on it. But that’s simply a statement of my lack of detailed knowledge. It’s possible that if I had enough data concerning every convection current I could have said: ah, this seed got wet because this, this this and this, happened, which kept that seed dry. In other words Chance is not a causal agent at all – it’s the way we refer to causal agents that we don’t know about, in detail, although we can often make probability predictions, nonetheless, based on what we know of the probability distribution of the events in question.
Necessity isn’t a causal agent either. It is simply a word we used to describe causation when the causal chain is very simple and very well known. If I press one end of a lever, the other end must rise – by “necessity”. Unless something didn’t know about – didn’t “model” – intervenes (cat sits on the other end, say).
So I’d say that Chance and Necessity simply mean “causation we haven’t modelled” and “causation we have modelled very precisely”, respectively. They aren’t causal agents in themselves. And better, I think, pace Monod, to think of all processes as stochastic – as having a probability distribution – where processes with a very small set of high probability outcomes are regarded as being on the “necessity” end of the spectrum, and processes with a very large set of low probability outcomes are regarded as being on the “chance” end.
Design, I would say, belongs in a quite different category altogether, and refers to real causation, at a specific level of analysis. We can say: this phenomenon occurred because Designer X wanted to bring about goal Y, and so created artefact Z. We could equally well describe the same thing in terms of chance and necessity: This phenomenon occurred because Designer X has a brain, and it received inputs W, which caused goal Y to be the criterion by which possible actions V were filtered and amplified, and so triggered physical actions that resulted in the making of artefact Z.
Athough it’s much simpler (and no less meaningful – and much more useful) to say: I typed this post because I wanted to try to explain to William why chance and necessity are different categories of concept and different again to the concept of Design.
Only if you regard “random” as coterminous with ” unintelligent”. I don’t. As I said, I regard “random” or “chance” as meaning “unmodelled”. I don’t even think that evolutionary processes are “unintelligent”. I do think they are unintentional (have no preset goal), but that doesn’t mean either random, or necessitous.
Actually I think this is one of the keys to the ID debate – “random” is treated as meaning so many different things, resulting in a great deal of inadvertent equivocation. Neuroscientific evidence suggests intelligent processes are highly stochastic, in deed that “random” neural firing (i.e. predictable only statistically) is necessary for “non-random” (systematic) cascades of neural activity to take place. Google “stochastic resonance”.
What Petrushka said.
The burden in science is always on the person making the positive claim. That’s why null hypothesis testing, for all its faults, is still the workhorse of data analysis.
If you want to infer a designer, you need to make a positive hypothesis that predicts something that the null doesn’t.
For example, the hypothesis of “front loading”. If an ID proponent could show that somehow the potential for future genetic patterns was present in archaic genetic patterns, and would be triggered into actuality by relevant environmental events (for example, that code for a nylon digesting enzyme in a bacterium was more likely to be generated in the presence of nylon than in the absence), then that would be pretty interesting, especially if you could figure out that it was a general rule. It would be hard to explain that in Darwinian terms, although the evolution of evolvability is certainly possible (as Shapiro points out).
Liz, you made the positive claim, not I. I didn’t claim a designer was necessary. By use of the term “Darwinian” in your statement:
… you have made the positive assertion that a designer is not necessary.
In order to avoid your ongoing semantics issue, I’ll rephrase my questions.
If we assume “Darwinian” means “without whatever commodity Liz thinks makes intentional, intelligent Designers different than other forces/processes, and “Design” means that very commodity (whatever Liz likes to call it), then:
1. How can you support your claim that Darwinian processes are sufficient to move from biological point A (for example, a primitive photosensitve cell) to biological point B (modern day full-color stereoscopic vision)?
2. How can you vet any process as “Darwinian”, by the above definition?
I asked:
Liz answered:
When someone says, “we have no evidence of water erosion”, or “we have no evidence of volcanic activity”, they can only say that because they know what positive evidence for those things would look like. That is how they can claim “there is no evidence for X” – they know what the evidence would look like, if it were present.
You are asserting that you do not have evidence for design. So, what would evidence for design look like in a biological frame of reference? You must know, or else you cannot say that you do not have such evidence.
So, once again: How do you know that you do not have evidence for design in the biological phenomena you are investigating?
Sure. OK, evidence of a designer present on earth 3 or 4 billion years ago (evidence independent of the putative artefact, I mean) might be evidence of colony of intelligent living creatures around of that time – other non-self-replicating artefacts, for instance, tools they might have used, shelter, some kind of energy-harvesting mechanism. And the designer is often assumed to have continued to tinker, making bacterial flagella, for instance, and active during the Cambrian explosion. Again, we’d expect to see traces of the designers during that time.
Given that none seems to be available, then the usually unspoken assumption by ID proponents is that the designer operates by means of some kind of forcefield – pushing atoms and molecules around, making sure certain DNA sequences are formed at certain times. So that idea also generates potentially testable hypotheses – we might be able to observe molecular interactions that do not seem to follow the rules of chemistry that we know of.
Well, the burden is not on me to say what evidence I would expect to see for a hypothesis I do not hold. What I would want to see, in order to take ID seriously as an inference from data (not as a theological proposition, which would be just fine) is independent evidence for a designer.
But that is something ID proponents refuse to provide. They just say: “the evidence is in the apparent design”. Well, no. That’s not independent evidence of a designer. We have an alternative hypothesis for that, which fits the data very well, and makes very good predictions. So what you need to do is to make a differential prediction – something that predicts something that would not be predicted on the basis of Darwinian theory, but would be predicted on the basis of an Intelligent Designer.
Because none has been presented. Unless you mean: how do you know it wasn’t designed? In which case the answer is, I don’t.
I asked:
Liz responded:
I’m talking about evidence in the biology being examined, not evidence that some such designer (that may or may not have had anything to do with any biological design) might have existed at the time, which would still not be evidence that it had anything to do with what we find in biology.
So, any evidence for biological design in the biology under examination must either be in the form of (1) we observe some putatively intelligently creature engaged in what we consider to be biological design, or (2) we must infer from the biology itself, somehow, that design is necessary as part of the explanation.
Are you claiming that it is impossible to infer from biological features themselves that design is probably a necessary part of the explanation?
If so, then how can you claim that design wasn’t necessary?
If not, then please tell me how you know design is unnecessary to the explanation.
This is entirely irrelevant to my question. I didn’t ask what IDists might consider to be evidence of design; I didn’t ask what you assume IDists think on the matter. You made a positive assertion: There is no evidence of design.
It is up to you to support it by explaining what “evidence of design” would look like in the biology you are examining and making your assertion about.
[[An aside: if you were to examine the biology – the cellular and molecular interactions – of intelligent, intentional human beings, and if those human beings through intentions commanded their biological bodies to recite a long Shakespearean sonnet to you – do you think you would find any chemicals disobeying the “rules of chemistry”?
You’ve said that the difference between design and non-design (in terms of this argument) is intention; what is intention? Can you see it interact with cells or chemicals? If you examine a human brain closely enough, would you expect to see a “force field” as intention interacts with cells and molecules?
I suspect you would not expect to find any such” force field” in operation. In fact, “intention” would not be something that could be inferred by looking just at the chemical interactions, is it? No, the “intention” part cannot be found by examining the behavior of individual mutations, molecular interactions, etc. – just as chance and necessity (or whatever semantics you wish to employ to characterize “non-intentional forces”) – or non-intention – cannot be seen as a “force field” and thus evidenced as “non-intentional processes”.]]
It is when you positively assert that there is no evidence for that hypothesis.
Think carefully about this, Liz. Essentially, what you have said is:
I don’t know what biological evidence for design would look like, but I know there isn’t any.
There is no known way to examine chemical interactions, mutations, normal cellular processes and infer either intention or non-intention; we infer intention or non-intention not at the chemical level, or cellular level (outside of an OOL argument); one cannot infer by examining the chemical interactions and arrangements by themselves if the process is sufficiently explained via intentional or unintentional processes; it can only be inferred by the product – a lump of iron vs a V8 engine block; an avalanche of rocks vs Stonehenge; the arrangement wildflowers and grass in the meadow of a forest vs crop circles. Assuming no chemical laws have been violated, and assuming no “force fields” were employed, examining anything at the chemical level is not where one can draw a reasonable inference of intention or non-intention as sufficient for explanation.
Where such inferences are employed and defended is in the larger product of those chemical processes and molecular interactions. What a V8 engine block “looks like” compared to a lump of iron spewed forth by a volcano. The inference is drawn from what the molecular, cellular, or chemical processes have produced, not in any observation of such processes as they do what they do (outside of OOL arguments).
Thus, when a combination of lawful physics and lawful chemistry and lawful molecular interactions produce a V8 engine block, the evidence for design lies not in observation of the molecules, chemicals, etc., but rather in what those things produced – even if we see no supposedly intentional designers creating the V8.
So, what does Liz refer to when she says “there is no evidence of design”? Why is she expecting to find force fields and chemicals disobeying the laws of chemistry? Does she find, or expect to find, any of that even in known cases of human intentional design?
In the very same way that there is evidence of intentional design anywhere else – even in the case of observing a supposedly intentional agency intentionally design and make something – we infer design from the product, not the chemical or cellular processes; which makes the universally agreed “appearance of design” (“it looks like design”) at least prima facie evidence of design in biology.
There is simply no way to support the claim “there is no evidence of design” when there is blatant, obvious prima facie evidence of design that virtually every biologist has agreed on: it looks like the product of design.
And here we have Liz saying, “I don’t know what evidence of design would look like, but I know there isn’t any,” and diving into the rabbit hole of speculation that “design” would look like a “force field pushing atoms around” or that chemicals would violate the laws of chemistry.
Really?
Lizzie:
William J. Murray:
Think carefully about this, William. Lizzie (and the rest of us) can say that there is no evidence for reptilian shapeshifters without specifying what positive evidence for reptilian shapeshifters would actually look like.
To say that there’s no evidence for X is merely to assert that none of the existing evidence supports X. I don’t need to specify, or know, what persuasive evidence for X would look like.
William,
You have descended to the bottom floor with this. You do realize that when JoeG is pushed back he says:
And now you are saying exactly the same thing.
I’ll ask you the same question I asked Joe about this:
Is there such a thing as a ‘fair dice’?
If so, how have you determined that?
If not, how have you determined that?
As it seems to me the claim can equally be made that “dice rolls are not random” as there’s no way to “vet” a specific roll of the dice to ensure it truly is “random”.
So, is there such a thing as a fair dice William?
How can any of you people over at UD imagine that you can feign any “expertise” in chemistry and physics when not one of you can demonstrate that you are capable of doing simple high school level calculations in physics and chemistry?
The molecules of life are not made of junkyard parts. The molecules of life are not made of letters in a scrabble game.
Do you know the quantitative difference between the energies of interaction among junkyard parts and atoms and molecules?
Can you explain why chunks of iron clunking together to form a V8 engine block have anything whatsoever to do with the behaviors of atoms and molecules? What would happen to those chunks of iron if they had the same charge-to-mass ratios and followed the same quantum mechanical rules as atoms and molecules?
Can you – or anyone over at UD, for that matter – scale up the charge-to-mass ratios of protons and electrons to kilogram-size masses separated by a meter and calculate the energies of interaction among such masses? Do you have any idea what those energies would be?
Do you – or any of your cohorts over a UD – know why that calculation has direct bearing on your V8 engine block example?
What possible justification can you come up with for substituting junkyard parts, chunks of iron, and scrabble letters for atoms and molecules?
Yes, it looks like the product of design. Where the designer has no foresight nor ability to move innovations in one lineage into another. Where the designer can only change one tiny thing at a time, and where many of those changes are simply discarded.
Yes, that sounds like the designers I’m familiar with. Or not.
Nobody disputes that life has “the appearance of design”. It just does not have the appearance of design of a designer other then the one just described. I.E. Evolution.
Where are the critters with wheels? Wheels are a problem for evolution but a designer can just skip over that part, can’t it?
So if this is all you’ve got, “things look designed” and “you can’t prove mutations are not non-random” then it seems that ID has very little to it other then claims that cannot be disproven (nor, indeed, proven).
Is there such a thing as a fair dice William?
Perhaps because he’s already done the relevant calculations and realized that the analogy falls apart at that point? So better just to pretend the analogy is relevant and carry on regardless perhaps then discard such a core, central tenet of ID that “tornado in a junkyard” actually has some relevance to biology.
Don’t forget this is the same person who recently claimed that FSCO is a useful metric and can “easily” be calculated. I can quote you on that if you like William.
Not necessarily. If, for example, someone were to discover that some stretch of DNA could be decoded into a message that said: I, the God of Isaac and of Jacob Made This”, then that would be quite persuasive. Or possibly other things I haven’t thought of.
There’s a point I keep making which you have not yet acknowledged, and it may be due to a culture gap, so let me try in a different way.
The way science usually works is like this:
We have a phenonemon that requires an explanation (what I called the “explanandum”: “what needs to be explained”.
We construct a theory that might explain it.
From that theory we derive hypotheses that make predictions about new data.
We test those predictions on new data.
If the predictions are supported, we claim the hypothesis is supported. If they are not, we modify the hypothesis, and sometimes the basic theory itself.
Let’s map this on to biological organisms:
Biological organisms are complex self-reproducing material entities consisting of many subsystems that tend to maximise its chance of self-reproduction. This is the explanandum – what we want to explain.
We construct theory 1:
We posit (as Darwin did) that originally there was an ancestral population of much simpler self-reproducing organisms, that reproduced, as organisms do today, with heritable variation, and some of those variations affected reproductive success. Over time, the most successful variants in any given environment tended to become those most prevalent, and lineages started to diverge, each occupying different environmental niches, and increasing both in diversity over space, and in in degree of adaptive evolution over time.
We also posit that they were designed.
From the first we derive testable hypotheses, and time after time their predictions are confirmed, and where they are not, the details of the theory are modified, and extended, and the picture gradually becomes clearer and clearer, rather as a jigsaw puzzle gradually becomes clearer and clearer, even though occasionally we find that what we thought was a piece of tree is a pattern on a little girl’s dress.
We start to publish text books explaining the theory and the increasingly vast body of facts that support it. Nothing in our theory rules out design, but design is not part of the theory.
In another part of the woods, some people construct theory 2
Biological organisms were designed.
From this, does anyone construct a testable hypothesis?
No. All they do is say: Theory 1 isn’t sufficient, so organisms must have been designed. And when pressed for evidence for a designer, they say: the evidence is in the biological organisms themselves.
In other words: Things look designed, therefore they probably are designed. It is circular. They only look designed because people think they are designed. They don’t look like any human artefacts we know of, nor are they generated by anything remotely resembling any human manufacturing process, and nor do their complex subsystems serve the purpose of any putative designer – they simply have the function of maximising the probablity of continuation of the own lineage. The actual “manufacturers” of the organisms do not design them, they give birth to them, and while some of organisms themselves are sometimes able to act with purpose, and indeed, design things, the one thing they don’t design is their own offspring (although finally, we are starting to figure out how to tinker with them).
That is why I keep saying: you are confusing the explanandum with the explanation you are trying to explain what you assert looks like design as being caused by a designer – why? because it looks like design! That’s like saying that because a planet looks like a star that’s evidence that it is one! No, it isn’t. We have two bright objects in the sky. We know one is a star. That doesn’t entitle us to conclude that the other probably is too, especially if it behaves very differently from stars, moving relative to them in the sky. And once we know it isn’t a star (doesn’t behave like one) we have no a priori reason for think it has much in common with a star at all. It might not even be self-luminous!
It’s not a necessary part of the theory. It’s perfectly possible that biological organisms were designed. But we aren’t left scratching our heads saying: we don’t have a mechanisms that can’t account for what we observe, given an initial population of self-replicators. On the other hand, we know perfectly well that Darwinian evolution can’t account for the first self-replicators, because self-replication is necessary for Darwinian evolution. So it’s possible that someone might say: but a designer could have done that bit.
But again, no particular reason to say that, because we don’t even know how simple those first self-replicators had to be. It might turn out that under certain physico-chemical scenarios they form fairly readily.
Because it’s not part of the explanation. You are reading too much into my claim.
Well, there isn’t any evidence that is independent of the thing we are trying to explain. And it’s not up to me to provide it. It’s up to the person making the claim.
No, it is not. I have no idea what “evidence of design” would like like in biology – it would depend on what the design hypothesis was. If it was a genetic engineer, then I’d look in the patent records, or even for some kind of “watermark” in the genetic code itself. If it was a colony of aliens, I’d look for archaeological or fossil evidence of aliens. If it’s an all powerful creator, it could be anything. If it’s a kind of deist creator who set things going then let them get on to it, I’d look for exactly what Darwin looked for. If it’s a not very competent army of invisible pixies with a fetish for adding bumwidgets to bacteria to help them kill kids more efficiently, then I guess I’d look for an irreducibly complex bacterial flagellum (and steer clear of Nick Matzke).
But it’s not my job because it’s not my theory. I also think it’s terrible theology, but that doesn’t, and shouldn’t, matter.
No.
No.
No – you’d have to look at the whole system.
Agreed. And if you want to characterise (as I have done in the past) the whole Darwinian system as an emergent “intelligent” system – fine. I think it has a lot in common with the way brains work. But what it doesn’t do is something that brains do do, which is to facilitate forward-modelling, in other words the simulation of alternative course of action and testing against outcomes matched against a goal. But if what you are saying is that biology is an emergent intelligent system, I’d agree. In fact, to get a bit New Agey about this, I think it’s possible to think of the entire universe as a system that tends to bring about beings that are capable of perceiving itself.
You misunderstand. It’s because I don’t know what biological evidence for design would look like that there isn’t any (to my knowledge). You present me with a hypothesis as to what biological evidence for design would look like, and if it differs from what biological evidence for non-design would look like, I’ll be more than happy to see whether it exists.
An analogy:
My credit card is missing but here isn’t any evidence that my house has been broken into. Aha! you say – how do you know? You don’t know what such evidence would look like. What would it look like? I ask. Well, you say, burglars use gloves, and they sometimes use picklocks, so you won’t necessarily see any signs of a break in, but it still could have been a burglar. I dunno, I say, knowing me, I probably left it somewhere stupid, like down the back the sofa, and in any case, there isn’t any evidence of a break in . How do you know?????? you repeat. I don’t, say I, but unless you can tell me what evidence for your gloved picklocker would look like, I don’t have any evidence!
You tell me how to tell what my house would look like if an invisible silent gloved picklocking burglar had broken in and stolen my credit card. In the mean time, I’ll continue to look down the back of the sofa.
I entirely agree. Intention is a property of a system at a much higher level than the chemical interactions. So where do you see “intention” in biology? Or intelligence?
I certainly see intelligence, of a sort, in the system we call Darwinian evolution. It’s such an intelligent system that we actually emulate the system in order to solve particularly intractable problems that we can’t solve using our own rather meagre intellects. However, what I do not see is “intention”,by which I mean choosing actions to maximise the probability of a distal goal. I see something that “feels” its way to the immediate proximal goal, which is to continue to exist.
Well, it depends what level you are examining. I entirely agree that we are interested in systems. But systems emerge from subsystems.
You’ve forgotten something crucial – the process by which those molecules, chemicals etc are assembled, into, on the one hand, a V8, and, on the other hand, an organism.
I’m not expecting to find them. And if what you are positing is an emergent intelligent system, so far from disagreeing with you, I’m way ahead of you.
You are conflating intelligence with intention, I think. I see plenty of evidence that evolution is an intelligent system (capable of “finding” complex solutions to the problem of preserving a lineage). I don’t see any evidence that it is an “intentional” system (has any capacity for choosing courses of action on the basis of whether they are most likely to promote an overall goal).
“Looks like” is not “evidence for”. And it doesn’t even look much like.
No, see above.
Why are you an ID supporter William?
Is it because of the evidence for ID?
Or is it because of what you perceive as failings in “Darwinism”?
If it’s the former, well what is that evidence that you find so persuasive? If the latter, well, give it a few more years, perhaps it’ll rise to your high standards.
I don’t agree that the appearance of design, in the absence of any identifiable designer, is any kind of evidence of design.
It is merely a subjective opinion, after all – designedness is in the eye of the beholder. It might well ( indeed, should) prompt thinking about ways in which design can be identified, but so far, all we have ended up with is bogosities like CSI and the whole constellation of related alphabet soup.
I’m alongside Lizzie,here. I think the combination of various known evolutionary processes gives us a highly colourable and effective intelligent designer, if an inefficient one. There are some advantages too. Evolution doesn’t require me to give up my Sundays, and its various sects and cults rub scratchily along without actually killing people.
Liz,
You keep rewording and rephrasing your responses – deliberately or not – either to avoid what are essential aspects of the challenges I put before you, or to obfuscate the nature of our debate.
In your “science generally works this was” monologue above, in the “theory 1” section, you conclude with:
So? Just because design “isn’t part of the theory” doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary to produce what it is claimed for those processes to have produced. You’re attempting a definitional fiat here. Just because “dark matter” wasn’t part of cosmological theories at the time doesn’t mean dark matter wasn’t necessary to produce what cosmological forces produced.
You reiterate, astoundingly:
But you admit you have no means by which to even determine if it is necessary or not. You might as well be a cosmologist who says “well, dark matter isn’t part of the theory of why the cosmos is the way it is, so it isn’t necessary to the theory”. What???
Look at this misrepresentation. You paraphrase my entire argument about the look of design being prima facie evidence of design as equivalent to:
.
Are you unfamiliar with the definition of “prima facie”? That doesn’t mean “they probably are designed”, it means there is reason to suspect it was designed. It is prima facie evidence for design.
The problem with your burglary analogy, Liz, is that we all know what “evidence of burglary” looks like when we see it. Door broken open, or window glass broken inward, possessions disorganized and lying about, stuff missing.
That may or may not be what happened, but “what it looks like” is prima facie evidence that your home has been burglarized – which is exactly analogous to what we find in living tings: it looks like it was designed which equates to it looks like it was burglarized.
Against the teeth of the prima facie evidence, you are the one claiming that your home was not burglarized, that what we see is the result of a hurricane or tornado or some other non-intentional force – which is possible.
Your position that there is “no evidence” of design relies upon your denial of the obvious prima facie evidence that virtually every biologist throughout history has agreed to – even those who are the biggest opponents of ID.
Because of the prima facie evidence, it is reasonable to ask for a means to determine whether or not design is a necessary part of the explanation; your blithe response “I don’t know what evidence for design would look like” doesn’t cut it. Everyone knows what “evidence for design” looks like – everyone, whether or not they can rigorously define and compute it or not. Your argument depends on explaining the blatantly obvious evidence for design some other way, even if it means co-opting “intelligence” as part of “Darwinism” and invoking some kind of cosmic teleology:
If there was no evidence of design, there would be no argument. You wouldn’t have to co-opt “intelligence” and make inane distinctions between “intention” and “intelligence” and “universal systems that tend to bring about beings capable of perceiving itself”. If there was no evidence of design, Darwin wouldn’t have tried so hard to explain the apparent design in terms of non-design. Darwin wouldn’t have been troubled by the eye, nor would the entire biological lexicon be based on and steeped in terms and analogies of design.
Sometimes, you just have to call BS. Your claim “there is no evidence of design” .. even “to your knowledge” … is either pure BS, or the result of blinding denial in the face of the blatantly obvious fact that there is at the very least enough prima facie evidence of design that the whole field uses design terminology, analogy, metaphor and investigative heuristics and virtually every scientists agrees that it looks like the product of design.
No reasonable debate with you is possible when you deny the patently obvious.
Neither of those things. I don’t hold beliefs because of evidence or lack thereof.
Are you an ID supporter?
That is correct. It looks like the product of design. Design by evolution. Is this so difficult to understand?
This is also true. For example, you deny the patently obvious that FSCO/I is a bogus metric and cannot be calculated.
Yes, it is. It is prima facie evidence. Are you saying that “what something looks like” is not enough evidence to pursue an investigation into whether or not there is any connection?
If it “looks like” your house has been burglarlized, should you not consider that to be evidence that your house has been burglarized, and just walk on in and start cleaning up before making sure no burglar was still there?
If a sonogram result “looks like” what cancerous tumors “look like”, should that not be treated as evidence which should be pursued?
If a witness tells you that someone looks like a person they saw commit a crime you are investigating, should you not consider that to be evidence at least to the point of investigating further in order to find more evidence to prove one way or another if that person could have been involved, or had a motive?
If an animal looks like another animal, should that not be considered prima facie evidence that the two animals my be related, at least to the point of investigating further to collect more evidence?
IMO, you’re just being absurd. Of course “looks like” is evidence – not proof, not compelling, but prima facie? Of course. it is – that’s the very definition of prima facie evidence, for crying out loud.
Yes.
William
And this is your evidence for Intelligent Design is it?
Of course things look designed. They are designed. Designed by a natural process that has a memory of what worked, what did not work, a source of variation and so on. All those things, and much more “design” what we observe around us in the biological world.
So sign me up for ID then eh? Or perhaps not.
Of course we observe intricate mechanisms that are made up of multiple interacting co-dependent pieces that appear to be designed. That’s because they were designed. Designed by a process that has been running for millions of years. In an environment that’s capable of periods of static and periods of change. And both, neither, mixed, pure.
And yes, the “biological lexicon” tilts towards analogies of design – most language is. It’s difficult to talk about anything without infusing those concepts into it. Gas “wants” to expand from a pressurized container. It “needs” to do it. Does that make gas intelligent? Given your claims here, why yes it does.
The theory of intelligent gassing. Sounds about right.
William
You had thousands of years where that was the default assumption. Why do you suppose that changed? Perhaps that investigation, that “followed the evidence where it led” changed peoples minds? What have you got that will change them back?
The analogy is somewhat tortured now. Care to reset it to a biological context?
If biology “looks like” it was designed to you then free free to get an education, qualifications and a job in a biological field. Then conduct research into the fact that, to you, biology “looks designed”.
Or offer some compelling reason to do so. The problem with a burglarized analogy is that there’s really only one inference to draw – you’ve been robbed, the pictures are on the floor etc. Yet with biology it’s possible to draw two distinctly different conclusions.
Yes, you’ve identified the cancer and can now treat it.
You’ve identified design – now what William?
Life is short. You are free to conduct whatever investigations you like, for however long as you like and publish the results wherever you like.
If you believe it so strongly you’d be doing that anyway.
Enough already.
Here we’re talking about, as you’ve ignored, something where there is an alternative to what it “looks like” on the surface. One that people have spent their professional lives studying, publishing and working in.
We left behind “looks like” science a long time ago.
Do you agree that the scientific evidence supporting “Darwinian” evolution is stronger then the scientific evidence supporting Intelligent Design?
William, it is unpleasant to be wrong, but it is shameful to be completely ignorant of the history you are criticizing.
Darwin was not only aware of Paley and the argument for intelligent design, he accepted it for a good part of his life.
Biology has moved on since then, but no one in the ID movement has come up with an argument not covered well by Paley. ID has stood still for 210 years.
I have no idea how you think this is relevant to anything I said.