Englishman in Istanbul proposes a thought experiment

at UD:

… 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.

215 thoughts on “Englishman in Istanbul proposes a thought experiment

  1. William J. Murray:
    Again, this is a question of logic, not of science.

    IF there is no metric available to determine that design is necessary in the explanation, THEN there is no metric available to determine that design is unnecessary in the explanation, because it is necessarily the same metric.

    I assume you mean: IF there is no metric available to determine that a thing must have been designed, THEN there is no metric available to determine that a thing was not designed, because it is necessarily the same metric.

    (you do have a tendency to confuse the explanation with what is to be explained!)

    But either way, you have made a simple logical error – the fallacy of the excluded middle. Consider:

    IF there is no way metric to determine whether a tumour must be malignant, THEN there is no metric to determine whether a tumour is not malignant, because sit is the same metric.

    Which is clearly false. We say a test has good positive predictive validity if when it says “yes” it is nearly always right. But the same test may have poor negative predictive validity – when it says “no” it may often be wrong. And vice versa. When it comes to cancer, we fix the criterion so that we get good negative predictive validity (No is nearly always no) but usually at the cost of poor positive predictive validity (Yes often turns out to be no), because more lives are saved that way, even though it costs us more in followups.

    And usually, scientific tests are against a null – whereby lack of positive support for your hypothesis does not tell you your hypothesis is false, merely that you have failed to reject the null.

    IF there is no metric available to determine that a thing must have been designed [no way of saying, yes, this thing is definitely designed], THEN there is no metric available to determine that a thing was not designed, because it is necessarily the same metric. there may still be a metric that will tell us that this thing was definitely not designed.

    And vice versa: IF there is a metric available to determine that a thing must have been designed [a way of saying, yes, this thing is definitely designed], THEN there is not necessarily a metric that will tell us that this thing was definitely not designed.

    And in fact there are very good metrics to tell us that a thing must have been designed. But it does not follow that we can necessarily tell that a thing was not designed. And indeed we cannot. Living things may well have been designed. That stream bed may have been designed. Indeed, I just spent the glorious weather at the weekend designing a water feature in our front garden in such a way that it looks like a stream bed that was not designed.

    Liz (and everyone here) has asserted that – at least currently – there is no such metric. If so, the positive claim that Liz made that her evolutionary explanation **is** sufficient **without design** cannot logically be supported, because she has no metricby which to make such a determination.

    Well, no. But there is another problem here. Science rarely deals with single metrics (measures). For example, we can measure whether someone diddled with a die (intelligently designed it not to be fair) by measuring the distribution of throws against the expected distribution under the null of not-diddled-with. But that measure won’t work for determining whether an object was a die intelligently designed to be fair, or a pebble with markings that someone noticed could be used as a die. In that case, the opposite would be the case – the carefully designed die would be the one that had the expected “fair” distribution of throws, and the pebble would be the one expected to have a different distribution.

    That is why I keep saying: if you want a set of measures (metrics) for determining whether something is designed, those measures will depend on your exact design hypothesis. You aren’t going to find a single litmus test that will infallibly detect design with perfect PPV, and even if you did, it wouldn’t necessarily have good NPV. For example a very good test of whether something is designed is the observation of someone designing it. Very good PPV. But hopeless NPV.

    You don’t have to know a bit of science to recognize a failure of logic.

    But apparently it helps 😉

  2. Eric Anderson illustrates the fallacy very neatly:

    This is really quite simple:

    1. Is x designed?
    2. Who designed x?

    I trust you can see that these are separate questions and that it is possible to answer the first without ever answering, or even asking for that matter, the second.

    No, they are not separate questions, Eric. It is the fundamental error of ID to think that they are. This is why E-prime is so useful in rooting out such errors. Translating into E-prime:

    1. Did somebody or something design x?
    2. Who designed x?

    My first is logically identical to Eric’s first, but written in E-Prime we can see that the questions are not separate at all, but intimately related. To answer the first we need to consider the second, and to answer the second, we need to consider the first.

    This is why science is iterative. This is why ID is not science.

  3. Mike Elzinga:
    . . .
    What do you get out of badgering Elizabeth?

    Why is there so much hatred towards her on the part of the UD people?
    . . . .

    My guess is 1 Timothy 2:12.

  4. To be fair, there was a lot of defence of women scientists at UD in response to Robert Byers’ expressed view that women aren’t very good at science.

  5. William:

    IF there is no metric available to determine that design is necessary in the explanation, THEN there is no metric available to determine that design is unnecessary in the explanation, because it is necessarily the same metric.

    Lizzie:

    But either way, you have made a simple logical error – the fallacy of the excluded middle. Consider:

    IF there is no way metric to determine whether a tumour must be malignant, THEN there is no metric to determine whether a tumour is not malignant, because sit is the same metric.

    Which is clearly false.

    This seems to be William’s logical blind spot. He made a similar error yesterday:

    [Quoting Lizzie]:

    Well, the burden is not on me to say what evidence I would expect to see for a hypothesis I do not hold.

    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.

    My response to William:

    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.

  6. Lizzie,

    I agree with Eric, actually. You needn’t consider the second question in order to answer the first.

    As I noted upthread, we could identify a “MarsHenge” as being designed despite not knowing (or assuming) anything about the designer(s):

    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.

    Having said that, any scientist worth his or her salt, upon identifying MarsHenge as designed, would immediately want to know who the designers were.

    The truth is that IDers, if they could demonstrate that life was designed, would also immediately want to know who the designer (or Designer) was. They just find it politically convenient to pretend that that question is not on the table, so that they can avoid mentioning the G-word.

  7. The truth is that IDers, if they could demonstrate that life was designed, would also immediately want to know who the designer (or Designer) was.

    They already “know” a priori.

    I just listened to the first 15 minutes of the Dembski video from a recent UD post. And Dembski is quite clear that the designer is a deity. He can’t be quite sure that it is the Christian deity, but he has no doubt that it is a deity.

    He has another remarkable argument in that 15 minutes. If you look at markings on the moon, they might appear random. But once you see the pattern of a face (the man in the moon), you will see that every time. Such a pattern must be the result of design.

    Of course Dembski does not make that argument about the man in the moon. But he makes it in such a way that it ought to apply.

  8. keiths:
    Lizzie,

    I agree with Eric, actually.You needn’t consider the second question in order to answer the first.

    As I noted upthread, we could identify a “MarsHenge” as being designed despite not knowing (or assuming) anything about the designer(s):

    Having said that, any scientist worth his or her salt, upon identifying MarsHenge as designed, would immediately want to know who the designers were.

    Yes indeed. And, as I have said many times, the big hint that MarsHenge was designed is that it doesn’t self-replicate, so that option is off the table. But I contend that to take “well, design is a possibility” any further than “we can’t see any non-design process that might have produced this” we’d want to ask “who might have designed it, and for what purpose?” Then we’d make some hypotheses about the designers, and test them. And with luck, eventually, we’d find archaeological evidence for Martian hengebuilders and possibly even fossilised Martians. That’s why I said that the two questions are intimately connected, not separate, and why scientific investigation is an iterative process.

    The truth is that IDers, if they could demonstrate that life was designed, would also immediately want to know who the designer (or Designer) was.They just find it politically convenient to pretend that that question is not on the table, so that they can avoid mentioning the G-word.

    The stopping place is certainly totally arbitrary, because, as I said, the two questions are intimately related. While a coroner can bring in a verdict of “murder by person or persons unknown”, the next stage is to identify the person. And sometimes, that process reveals that the first verdict was not correct.

  9. Patrick:

    My guess is 1 Timothy 2:12.

    They apparently follow everything she says over here because they are now denying their hatred.

    Yet their denials ring hollow because they are asserting that she is unwilling or incapable of honestly representing their design argument.

    That kairosfocus character claims not to hate her, but then he goes on to accuse her of distorting ID/creationist views in order to gain some advantage in what she hopes to promote. Kairosfocus’s lengthy rants and accusations are full of vitriolic innuendos that leave no doubt about what he is accusing his enemies of.

    It seems obvious that the hatred is directed at Elizabeth, because we can see that they are reading what she says and ignoring the critiques of others. They don’t comprehend that scaling up calculation of the charge-to-mass ratios of protons and electrons because they didn’t read it, even though it is in the same thread in which they hang on everything Elizabeth says.

    William J Murray has been taken to task by several people here, but the people over at UD only respond to Elizabeth’s critiques and imply she is lying and distorting.

    So I don’t believe the claims over at UD that they don’t hate. Hatred is their specialty; their repulsive site just reeks with it.

  10. I don’t think it’s that Mike. Joe G is obviously pissed off that he got banned here (although it was pretty much suicide-by-admin – he can’t honestly have thought I’d tolerate porn links) and only ever quotes my posts over there. I don’t think most of the people who respond to Joe’s partial quotes of my posts actually read them directly. They certainly don’t attempt to address anything Joe didn’t actually quote.

    That’s why I take my hat of to William for sticking it out here. I think the more fundamental problem is that most ID ists simply don’t understand the nature of scientific claims – they think we are making a claim we aren’t, and they make unsupported scientific claims themselves, because they don’t know how to make a scientific inference.

    Hunter should, he’s got training, but he doesn’t have a clue. Dembski’s training isn’t in empirical science. I guess there are a few biochemists, but they seem unable to see the wood for the trees. Or rather they stare at a few trees, and make unsupported inferences about the entire forest.

  11. If their position is being misrepresented then all it takes is KF, once, to come over here and set the record straight.

    Then KF can link to that correction at UD forever and a day and anyone who cares to look can see the quality of his corrective measures and responses to pointed questions.

    But it does not matter as it’ll never happen. Here’s a quote from Eric just now:

    Ya know, I went outside the other day and saw some rocks. At first I thought perhaps they weren’t designed, but then I realized they couldn’t self-replicate, which tipped me off that they must have been designed. Yeah, right.

    How can someone actually think that: (i) self replication automatically provides the means for design substitute, and (ii) the absence of self-replication is a reliable criterion of design?

    Yes, because that’s what being claimed Eric. And they complain about being misrepresented!

  12. Eric,

    Instead of assuming that Lizzie is making that ridiculous argument, a responsible person would come to TSZ to see what she is actually saying.

    What’s your excuse?

  13. Joe G. certainly appears to have some serious emotional problems of his own. Yet he appears to be an acceptable mascot who is useful for throwing feces over at UD.

    But from what I can see of the constant kvetching and pity-partying going on over at UD, they don’t appear to like anybody very much. Many of the regulars over there seem prone to conspiracy-theory type thinking.

    Many of them comment about “your ilk” when referring to your site; and they have repeatedly accused you of lying and distorting when you did nothing of the sort. I don’t know if has been your patient courtesy or your reasonableness that irks them so much; but whatever it is, they seem to think you are up to no good. The tone and paranoia at UD are very much like our current political climate here in the US.

    I have been watching the ID/creationist movement since the 1970s; and I spent a good deal of that time attempting to educate the public without directly confronting the ID/creationists. I’ve been to some of their churches, observed them on television, listened to them rant on campus quads, and have read their literature and “internal” communications.

    I think I have some feel for their fear and loathing; and that fear and loathing has been used by political operatives like Lee Atwater and his protégé, Karl Rove, here in the US to muck up our political elections and discussions.

    There is a great deal of hatred among these sectarians that they refuse to admit to “outsiders.” We saw it in the death threats to Judge Jones after the Dover decision, in Dembski’s fart video after that decision, and in the continual demonizing of judges who don’t rule in favor of sectarian religion in the courts. I have newspaper clippings of letters to the editors of various newspapers that express the fears and loathing of their writers toward the public schools and science. The cultural hatred is real and palpable here in the US. Many of the militia organizations here in the US have sectarian undertones, or leverage sectarian suspicions to support paranoia about secular government taking away civil liberties and outlawing religion.

    This paranoid Right Wing agenda has taken over the Republican Party almost completely here in the US; to the point that our Congress can’t even function any longer. Senators and House Representatives refuse to even talk with each other; and a few remaining sane members of the Republican Party have admitted directly on television that the objective of the Right Wing is to sabotage every attempt by our current President and Congress to get anything accomplished. Sectarian hatred and bigotry is a large part of it, and it comes out in many unguarded moments.

    I will grant that William J Murray has at least “toughed it out” here. However, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that any of the facts and perspectives of science have had any impact on his thinking.

  14. Lizzie,

    But I contend that to take “well, design is a possibility” any further than “we can’t see any non-design process that might have produced this” we’d want to ask “who might have designed it, and for what purpose?”

    If we stumbled upon a MarsHenge, we wouldn’t merely conclude that “well, design is a possibility.” We’d conclude that it was designed, and we would reach that conclusion despite knowing nothing about the designers.

    In other words, we could answer question #1 (was MarsHenge designed?) without even asking question #2 (who designed MarsHenge?). They’re separate questions.

    As I put it earlier:

    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.

    We could be wrong about the unknown physical processes, sure, but that’s always true in science.

  15. For a while we did have Marshenge. Suppose for the sake of argument that the mars face, upon closer examination, showed more face-like detail instead of less.

    But we don’t have to guess how we would resolve such ambiguities. We have an actual case with an actual process of resolution.

    Similar questions come up regarding ancient footprints and stone tools. The process for examining such things is part of the historical record.

  16. Petrushka,

    Suppose for the sake of argument that the mars face, upon closer examination, showed more face-like detail instead of less.

    More importantly, suppose the details were out of reach of known geological processes and unlikely to be explained by any unguided physical process, known or unknown.

    Similar questions come up regarding ancient footprints and stone tools. The process for examining such things is part of the historical record.

    The difference is that in those cases, we already have candidate designers — humans — in mind. If the Curiosity rover spotted a MarsHenge tomorrow, no one would have any idea who designed it. But who would doubt that it was designed?

  17. The problem isn’t interesting unless it’s ambiguous.

    My point is that the process of studying ambiguous or unexplained is more important than the answer.

    I’ve often asked ID supporter to name an instance in the history of science when the assumption of miraculous intervention was more useful than the assumption of regularity. What process or phenomena has best been explained by angels or aliens or whatever.

  18. Lizzie,

    Fair enough, but I do think the inherent misogyny of the Abrahamic religions plays a large part in the reception you receive at UD. That is exacerbated by your articulate and patient responses. Basically, you’re their worst nightmare: an intelligent, educated, female, former christian with the stamina and inclination to refute their nonsense.

  19. Joe,

    If something looks designed we have every right to check into that possibility.

    I agree. You have every right to do so and I encourage you to do exactly that. Yet you seem strangely reluctant to do so given that in the years (literally) you’ve been saying this you don’t appear to have done so.

    And if blind and undirected processes cannot account for it, we then infer it was designed.

    But your claim would have more weight if you could explain specifically how you determined that “blind and undirected processess” cannot account for the cell. You say it like it’s happened already and you just forgot to publish the evidence.

    Do you have a list of what was ruled out? I imagine it’s quite some list.

  20. And also

    “it looks like unguided evolution to me” isn’t science…

    I quite agree. Yet your core ID proposal that “mutations might not be random” is not science either, for the same reasons.

    Can you think of a test that would determine if evolution was guided or unguided Joe?

    That would be science…

  21. For a site that ostensibly bans people for violating the rules of classical logic, they sure do do a lot of middle-excluding.

    I think it’s because they don’t (right up to Dembski) understand probability. As Jacob Cohen points out, in The world is round, p&gt.05 :

    it is correct logically, if we grant the false premise, to say:

      If a person is American, he is not a member of Congress (WRONG!)
      This person is a member of congress
      Therefore this person is not an American.

    The conclusion is false, but only because the premise is false. If we replaced “an American” with “a Russian” we’d have a true premise and a true conclusion, using modus tollens.

    However, we can also make the original premise true by making it probabilistic:

      If a person is American, he is probably not a member of Congress (TRUE!)
      This person is a member of Congress
      Therefore this person is not probably not an American.

    The conclusion becomes false! In other words, just because a modus tollens syllogism works for a binary true-false premise, and a binary true-false conclusion, it does not necessarily work for a probabilistic premise or conclusion.

    Thus while this would be logical, despite its dubious premise:

      If a thing is natural, it does not look designed
      This thing looks designed.
      Therefore it is not natural

    this, which has a more defensible premise:

      If a thing is natural, it probably does not look designed
      This thing looks designed
      Therefore it is probably is not natural.

    is not actually a valid conclusion! And yet it is pretty well exactly the argument William is making.

    And the reason it is not valid is exactly the same reason as the reason that just because a cancer test correctly detects 99% of cancers, that does not mean that if you have a positive cancer test, you have a 99% probablity of having cancer.

    Bayes ftw

  22. Petrushka,

    The problem isn’t interesting unless it’s ambiguous.

    Are you kidding? The discovery of a MarsHenge would be earth-shakingly interesting, though it would be unambiguously designed.

  23. I wonder if William will read and understand your comment.

    If he does, I wonder if he will acknowledge his error.

  24. They concede that unguided evolution can bring about microevolutionary changes, but they claim that it cannot be responsible for macroevolutionary changes. Yet they give no plausible reasons why microevolutionary changes, accumulating over a long period of time, should fail to produce macroevolutionary changes.

    Yes, the whole “origin of bodyplans” idea they have lately I think grew out of a desire to avoid these issues. The answer, of course, is that X’s current “bodyplan” came from it’s parent. Who, surprisingly to IDers, was really quite similar to it’s child and so had a very similar bodyplan.

  25. JoeG,

    ya see you say it has already been determined that evolution is unguided but yet cannot say why.

    Well, apart from anything else (such as the link above) we’ve never seen any evidence of it being intelligently guided. Despite looking really quite closely now. That’s not to say it might be happening. It might! All you have to do is persuade me that it is.

    But int he meanwhile you said something about Newton and unneeded entities? Well, that. So the possibility remains open, but we have an explanation we’re happy with thanks.

    So it’s not been determined that evolution is unguided. Nor has it been determined that evolution is not powered by elves. And if you are happy for ID to rest there, then you are already there and can relax. If, however, you want it to be more then a word game based on the impossibility of proving a negative then you’ll have to put a bit more work in then you’ve done so far as the whole ticks/watermelon thing really should not be the only practical work on the ID roster if you want people to take ID seriously.

  26. I didn’t mention it in my comments about the sectarians in Right Wing politics in the US, but misogyny is alive and well in Republican controlled state legislatures in the US.

    Since the 2010 midterm elections, there has been an unprecedented flurry of legislation against women’s health in those states. All Republican dominated state legislatures are falling all over themselves to copycat legislation signed into law in other Republican dominated state legislatures.

    The current US House of Representatives has a bunch of these crazies repeatedly submitting legislation that would take away women’s rights to contraception and basic health care. The preoccupation with women’s sexual organs and birth control is downright creepy.

  27. I agree that if virtually every biologists thinks ID is bunk, that is prima facie evidence to consider that it might be bunk. It doesn’t prove it, nor is it compelling; but certainly such testimony is good as far as a preliminary consideration is concerned.

  28. I assume you mean: IF there is no metric available to determine that a thing must have been designed, THEN there is no metric available to determine that a thing was not designed, because it is necessarily the same metric.

    (you do have a tendency to confuse the explanation with what is to be explained!)

    But either way, you have made a simple logical error – the fallacy of the excluded middle. Consider:

    IF there is no way metric to determine whether a tumour must be malignant, THEN there is no metric to determine whether a tumour is not malignant, because sit is the same metric.

    Liz: I agree that your statement is a fallacy. But, that’s not what I said. Please note that I structured my dichotomy so that it was a true dichotomy – which is what we have; if there is a metric that can determine X, then it must also be able to determine not-X. If a metric can determine if a brick is red (given precise parameters of what “red” means), then it must also be able to determine if the bric is not red. That’s basic principle of identity; A, and not-A.

    If you have a metric that can determine that a tumor is cancerous, you **must** also have a metric (the same metric) that can determine if a tumor is not cancerous.

    So, if we have a metric (system, means, capacity, argument, measurement) that can determine design unnecessary; we must also have a metric that can determine design as necessary. Those two conditions: design-necessary, and design-unnecessary, are mutually exhaustive of all possibilities.

  29. That’s the thing Lizzie, you keep talking about an advantage to the organism. Yet if unguided evolution is true, there is no concept of advantage. Advantage only plays well under an ID paradigm.

    Cecal valves is a case in point. Did lizards take advantage of cecal valves or did they need them to avoid starvation?

    Do birds eat larger seeds because of the increase in beak size or did the beaks become progressively larger because birds had no choice but to eat larger seeds, creating the pressure for larger beak size?

    Do bacteria metabolize citrate because they already had the mutation in hand, or did they mutate their genomes in order to avoid starvation like the lizards?

    In fact all of these observations show there is no such thing as organisms taking advantage of anything. They are creating the tools they need as required.

    Natural selection simply preserves the ID taking place in the genome.

    Yes, I know it is hard to wrap your (pl) brain around intelligence being already embedded in organisms.

    But there it is.

    Lizzie,

  30. Yes, I know it is hard to wrap your (pl) brain around intelligence being already embedded in organisms.

    Then why did it take so long and so many generations for the intelligence already embedded in Lenski’s bacteria to make the required changes so it could digest citrate?

    In fact, you would expect all lineages to have that change, but they all did not. This neatly undercuts your claim as if there really was intelligence embedded in the bacteria then it would have reacted the same way to the same stimuli. And it did not. Therefore your “innate intelligence” seems to rely on random mutations to do it’s work.

    Therefore your case is dismissed for lack of evidence.

  31. William J. Murray: Liz: I agree that your statement is a fallacy. But, that’s not what I said. Please note that I structured my dichotomy so that it was a true dichotomy – which is what we have; if there is a metric that can determine X, then it must also be able to determine not-X. If a metric can determine if a brick is red (given precise parameters of what “red” means), then it must also be able to determine if the bric is not red. That’s basic principle of identity; A, and not-A.

    You are misapplying the principle of identity, William.

    A thing cannot be designed and not-designed.

    However, a measure to determine with 100% success that a thing is designed will not necessarily determine with 100% success that a thing is not designed. That is not a violation of the law of identity, because a measure to detect something is not the same thing, ontologically, as the thing it is detecting.

    If you have a metric that can determine that a tumor is cancerous, you **must** also have a metric (the same metric) that can determine if a tumor is not cancerous.

    No. This is simply incorrect, William. Google signal detection theory

    Let’s say that all tumours that register over 8 on some metric are malignant. We now have a metric that will tell us, with 100% reliability, that this tumour is malignant.

    However, let’s say that some tumors that register less than 8 but more than 6 are also malignant. And you have a tumor, and it registers 7. Your doctor cannot tell you for sure that your tumor is not malignant.

    Yet the same metric has been used. Please read the post of mine that is immediately above yours.

    So, if we have a metric (system, means, capacity, argument, measurement) that can determine design unnecessary; we must also have a metric that can determine design as necessary.Those two conditions: design-necessary, and design-unnecessary, are mutually exhaustive of all possibilities.

    No. You’ve made a logical error.

    This is correct:

    Design-necessary and design-unnecessary are mutually exhaustive of all possibilities.

    This is not:

    So, if we have a metric (system, means, capacity, argument, measurement) that can determine design unnecessary; we must also have a metric that can determine design as necessary.

    In the first you have two entities: an entity that must have been designed; an entity that need not have been designed. No entity can be both those things.

    In the second, you have three entities: an entity that must have been designed; an entity that need not have been designed; and a metric.

    There is nothing in the law of non-contradiction that tells you that that metric must reliably tell you that an entity is either the first thing (must have been designed) or the second thing (need not have been designed).

    And in fact, there is no metric that I can think of that can do such a thing. This is because all metrics come with what is called “measurement error”. There is no such thing as an error-free measurement. As a result, if we want a measure to reliably tell us that something is X, we say that to indicate X, the measurement must be at least Y. But that will inevitably mean that we miss some X, even if none of our diagnoses of X are false. In practice, in medicine, we usually do it the other way round – we want to pick up as many cases of X as we can, so we make the criterion rather liberal. We set it so that if we get a measurement of less than Y, we can be confident that the thing is not-X. However, that does not tell us that the thing must be X – and we send the patient for further tests.

    Look William, I know that you are not a scientist, and that you do not know a lot of math, but you are clearly an intelligent man. I do suggest that you read a primer on Signal Detection Theory (which is something I use almost daily in my work), so that you can at least see where I am coming from on this.

    It’s actually rather fundamental. Dembski, who has far less excuse, being a mathematician and all, ought to read it too.

  32. Steve:
    That’s the thing Lizzie, you keep talking about an advantage to the organism.Yet if unguided evolution is true, there is no concept of advantage.Advantage only plays well under an ID paradigm.

    This is not true, Steve. We can easily conceptualise “advantage” under a non-ID paradigm, and we do, very precisely: “advantage to the organism” in this context, simply means: increases its chances of producing viable offspring.

    Cecal valves is a case in point.Did lizards take advantage of cecal valves or did they need them to avoid starvation?

    Neither. Lizards with slightly more efficient cecal valves were more likely to live long enough to bear offspring, to whom they passed on their slightly more efficient cecal valves.

    Do birds eat larger seeds because of the increase in beak size or did the beaks become progressively larger because birds had no choice but to eat larger seeds, creating the pressure for larger beak size?

    Neither. When larger seeds become more abundant than smaller seeds, those birds with slightly larger beaks were able to forage more efficiently, and so were more likely to leave offspring, to whom they passed on their slightly larger beaks.

    Do bacteria metabolize citrate because they already had the mutation in hand, or did they mutate their genomes in order to avoid starvation like the lizards?

    This is a slightly more interesting question. Sometimes a useless trait that is already widespread in a population becomes useful when the environment changes. However, if you are referring to Lenski’s experiment, the original population did not possess the trait. However, every so often, a bacterium would find itself with the trait de novo, and, in an environment containing citrate, would thrive much better than its peers, rapidly outbreeding them.

    In fact all of these observations show there is no such thing as organisms taking advantage of anything.They are creating the tools they need as required.

    Neither. They are not “taking advantage” nor are they “creating as required”. The organisms themselves are not the agents here. That is just a manner of speaking. What is actually happening, is that when a trait appears de novo that tends to increase the probability of viable offspring, or when an environment changes in such a way that an existing trait in a population that has hitherto made no difference to the probability of survival now increases it, then that trait will rapidly become more prevalent in the population.

    Remember that it is populations that evolve, not individual organisms.

    Natural selection simply preserves the ID taking place in the genome.

    Only if you posit that an Intelligent Designer is responsible for providing the right trait at the right time. We don’t have any evidence that this is the case; what we do have is evidence that robust populations have lots of genetic diversity, and that genetic diversity is constantly increasing due to de novo mutations, so that when an environment changes, or a new trait arrives that confers an increased probability of viable offspring in the current environmenet, the newly “advantageous” (i.e. conferring greater probability of viable offspring), traits, by definition, become more prevalent, and we say the population has “evolved” an environmental adaptation.

    Yes, I know it is hard to wrap your (pl) brain around intelligence being already embedded in organisms.

    But there it is.

    I’m not sure what my “(pl) brain” means, but I have repeatedly said that intelligence, of a kind, is intrinsic to the evolutionary process. However it is not intentional intelligence, as far as we can tell – things are not selected for their potential future advantage, but only because they are currently advantageous (where “advantageous” means, as I have said: increases the probability of viable offspring).

    Anyway, thanks for showing up, Steve, and I hope you will stick around! I do appreciate it when people from the ID community come here in person to discuss these questions.

  33. However, a measure to determine with 100% success that a thing is designed will not necessarily determine with 100% success that a thing is not designed. That is not a violation of the law of identity, because a measure to detect something is not the same thing, ontologically, as the thing it is detecting.

    Let’s say that all tumours that register over 8 on some metric are malignant. We now have a metric that will tell us, with 100% reliability, that this tumour is malignant.

    However, let’s say that some tumors that register less than 8 but more than 6 are also malignant. And you have a tumor, and it registers 7. Your doctor cannot tell you for sure that your tumor is not malignant.

    Yet the same metric has been used. Please read the post of mine that is immediately above yours.

    You have a metric above that is used for making a determination about whether or not a tumor is cancerous. That metric makes a determination, right or wrong; is cancer necessary to explain what we see in the tumor, as arbited by our metric? Yes = a finding that cancer is necessary in the explanation of what we see; No = cancer is not necessary in the explanation of what we see.

    I never said the metric was 100% reliable. You’re conflating the outcome of the use of the metric and whether or not the tumor itself is actually cancerous (ontology) with the dichotomous nature of the metric itself (epistemology). Although the tumor may be cancerous, the metric makes the determination that cancer is not necessary to the explanation of what we see in the tumor. Although the tumor might not be cancerous, depending on the reliability of the metric used, a false positive is also possible. That is irrelevant to the dichotomous nature of the metric itself.

    Your own example demonstrates my very point: you cannot make the determination that cancer is a necessary part of the explanation (as per the metric, even if not 100% reliable) without also being able to determine if cancer is not a necessary part of the explanation (as per the metric, even if the metric is faulty).

    This isn’t about ontological truth of the matter if the tumor is cancerous or not; it’s about the epistemological nature of dichotomous, determining metrics, if they have no means of determining a “not-A” value, then it has no way of determining something as having the value of A. If the metric cannot make a not-A determination (regardless of the true nature of the thing being examined), then everything will come up positive for “A”.

    So, when you say “design is not necessary”, you must also have a means by which to say “design is necessary”, whether or not those determinations are “100%” true, or else all you are doing is making a metric-free ideological assertion.

  34. Lizzie, organisms always produce viable offspring. There is no ‘advantage’ gained. The advantage is embedded in the organism’s ability to produce more offspring than will survive. There is bound to be one that survives and the rest is donated to the food chain; ie rabbits produce several to keep a couple, snakes produce hundreds to keep several, roaches produce thousands to keep dozens; etc. etc.

    This is not true, Steve. We can easily conceptualise “advantage” under a non-ID paradigm, and we do, very precisely: “advantage to the organism” in this context, simply means: increases its chances of producing viable offspring.

    It is not a matter of slightly more efficient cecal valves but the fact that no cecal valves were present. However, when the lizards were transplanted to a new environment, they developed cecal valves. They didn’t start with slighly more efficent valves but started with no valves at all. Different animals.

    Neither. Lizards with slightly more efficient cecal valves were more likely to live long enough to bear offspring, to whom they passed on their slightly more efficient cecal valves.

    In fact, bird beaks became increasingly larger, not just a single instance of a slightly larger beak. And when there was no need for the larger beaks, they shrunk back to the original size. So there is nothing about birds taking an advantage of anything, but a systematic adjustment to a changing environment. To assert that ‘they just so happened to have a slighly larger beak and that one was more successful so it expanded in the population’ is a sterile concept. They didn’t just so happen to leave offspring with an advantage but it is a deliberate process that happens again and again.

    Again organism are not ‘more likely’ to leave a few viable offspring’. They ALWAYS do.

    Neither. When larger seeds become more abundant than smaller seeds, those birds with slightly larger beaks were able to forage more efficiently, and so were more likely to leave offspring, to whom they passed on their slightly larger beaks.

    By now we can see that what you are saying is simply not true. James Shapiro’s research provides compelling evidence that in fact organism do in fact engineer the genomes to adapt. The amount of offspring and the frequency of generation is the genomes tool for spreading the correct mutations at the correct time. Cecal valves and bird beaks speak to this ability.

    Neither. They are not “taking advantage” nor are they “creating as required”. The organisms themselves are not the agents here. That is just a manner of speaking. What is actually happening, is that when a trait appears de novo that tends to increase the probability of viable offspring, or when an environment changes in such a way that an existing trait in a population that has hitherto made no difference to the probability of survival now increases it, then that trait will rapidly become more prevalent in the population.

    No need to posit a designer, only the existence of embedded intelligence. All we have to do is look at bacterial colonies that act as a single organism, where each cell communicates with the rest of the colony at a distance to understand the concept of embedded intelligence.

    Ultimately, ‘advantageous mutations spreading throughout a population’ has been a clever argument but at the end of the day, a false one.

    Only if you posit that an Intelligent Designer is responsible for providing the right trait at the right time. We don’t have any evidence that this is the case; what we do have is evidence that robust populations have lots of genetic diversity, and that genetic diversity is constantly increasing due to de novo mutations, so that when an environment changes, or a new trait arrives that confers an increased probability of viable offspring in the current environmenet, the newly “advantageous” (i.e. conferring greater probability of viable offspring), traits, by definition, become more prevalent, and we say the population has “evolved” an environmental adaptation.

  35. William J. Murray:
    it’s about the epistemological nature of dichotomous, determining metrics, if they have no means of determining a “not-A” value, then it has no way of determining something as having the value of A.If the metric cannot make a not-A determination (regardless of the true nature of the thing being examined), then everything will come up positive for “A”.

    Am I missing something, because this seems too easily refuted? Say I want to know if people are U.S. citizens, and I choose for my metric whether they have US passports. If people produce U.S. passports, then I conclude unambiguously that they are citizens (though I could wrong if, for example, someone has a forged passport). But for all the people who do not produce U.S. passports, I cannot thereby conclude they are not U.S. citizens. The lack of a passport says nothing about citizenship. The metric is perfectly valid for A, but perfectly useless for not-A.

  36. Steve:
    Lizzie, organisms always produce viable offspring.There is no ‘advantage’ gained.The advantage is embedded in the organism’s ability to produce more offspring than will survive.There is bound to be one that survives …

    … Again organism are not ‘more likely’ to leave a few viable offspring’.They ALWAYS do.

    Ridiculous. You can’t even get the single most basic fact of biology correct.

    Everything else you say can be discarded immediately since it is based on this crazy idea of yours.

  37. Hobbes: Am I missing something, because this seems too easily refuted? Say I want to know if people are U.S. citizens, and I choose for my metric whether they have US passports. If people produce U.S. passports, then I conclude unambiguously that they are citizens (though I could wrong if, for example, someone has a forged passport). But for all the people who do not produce U.S. passports, I cannot thereby conclude they are not U.S. citizens. The lack of a passport says nothing about citizenship. The metric is perfectly valid for A, but perfectly useless for not-A.

    Yes, you’re correct, and WJM is incorrect, in regards to “metric for design” that he thinks “Darwinists” should be able to construct for his delectation. He states that because the logical rule of non-contradiction says that a person cannot be both a US citizen and not a US citizen simultaneously (cf. both designed and not-designed biologically) that we must be able to, in principle, conceive of some metric that will separate the two groups.
    He’s wrong.

    Of course, we can after some thought conceive of the metrics that will separate citizens from non-citizens. It’s settled by law. I note that it’s settled differently by law in different countries, including ones which have different definitions of “dual citizenship” than the USA, pointing out the importance of a mutually-agreed definition of the groups to begin with that one wishes to separate. Yet again, we will have an opportunity for the IDist to complain that the Darwinists are trying to quibble about mere semantics in order to deflect attention from the “obvious” logical dilemma: Is he a citizen or not? Is it designed or not? Yes or no? Why are you Darwinists always trying to wiggle out of answering the simple question?
    Well, first we need to have a mutually-agreed on definition of “designed” …

    You’re right. Sometimes we can tell the “Is” answer without, even in principle, ever being able to determine the “Is not” answer. Sometimes we can tell the “Is not” answer, without, even in principal, being able to determine the “Is” answer.

  38. William J. Murray: You have a metric above that is used for making a determination about whether or not a tumor is cancerous. That metric makes a determination, right or wrong; is cancer necessary to explain what we see in the tumor, as arbited by our metric?Yes = a finding that cancer is necessary in the explanation of what we see; No = cancer is not necessary in the explanation of what we see.

    I never said the metric was 100% reliable. You’re conflating the outcome of the use of the metric and whether or not the tumor itself is actually cancerous (ontology) with the dichotomous nature of the metric itself (epistemology).Although the tumor may be cancerous, the metric makes the determination that cancer is not necessary to the explanation of what we see in the tumor. Although the tumor might not be cancerous, depending on the reliability of the metric used, a false positive is also possible.That is irrelevant to the dichotomous nature of the metric itself.

    Your own example demonstrates my very point: you cannot make the determination that cancer is a necessary part of the explanation (as per the metric, even if not 100% reliable) without also being able to determine if cancer is not a necessary part of the explanation (as per the metric, even if the metric is faulty).

    This isn’t about ontological truth of the matter if the tumor is cancerous or not; it’s about the epistemological nature of dichotomous, determining metrics, if they have no means of determining a “not-A” value, then it has no way of determining something as having the value of A.If the metric cannot make a not-A determination (regardless of the true nature of the thing being examined), then everything will come up positive for “A”.

    So, when you say “design is not necessary”, you must also have a means by which to say “design is necessary”, whether or not those determinations are “100%” true, or else all you are doing is making a metric-free ideological assertion.

    OK, I think I see the problem. We have at least three possible targets for the word “necessary” here. I will firstly tackle two of them.

    When we refer to a test to determine whether something is “design-necessary”, we could either mean a test that would tell you whether a designer was necessary for the object to exist; or a test that would tell us whether an object was necessarily designed These two things are not the same – in the first we are asking whether a designer is necessary; in the second we are asking whether something is necessarily true. But let’s consider both.

    Let’s call the first test the ABC test.

    We apply it to Stonehenge. It comes back positive. Cool. We know (with whatever degree of confidence you like, it needn’t be 100%) that a designer is necessary for Stonehenge to exist, therefore we can infer a designer for Stonehenge. Now we apply it to a bacterial flagellum. It comes back negative. Can we infer that a designer is not necessary for a bacterial flagellum to exist? No, the test doesn’t tell us that. All it tells us is that we don’t have enough information to know whether the bacterial flagellum requires a designer or not.

    Let’s call the second test the XYZ test. The XYZ test tells you not whether a designer was necessary for the object, but whether the object was necessarily designed We apply it to Stonehenge, and it comes back positive. We conclude that Stonehenge was necessarily designed, and we infer a designer. We apply it to the bacterial flagellum, and it comes back negative. We infer that the bacterial flagellum was not necessarily designed.

    In the ABC test, we can determine whether design is necessary (positive ABC test) but not that it is unnecessary (negative ABC test doesn’t tell us that design is unnecessary). In other words just because we can tell when design is necessary, doesn’t mean we can tell when design is unnecessary.

    In the XYZ test, we can determine that the object was necessarily designed (positive XYZ test) or that it was not necessarily designed (negative XYZ test). In this case, as long as we can tell that something was necessarily designed, we can also tell whether a thing was not necessarily designed.

    I had assumed you had in mind an ABC test; it seems you had in mind an XYZ test.

    However, this was your original point:

    IF there is no metric available to determine that design is necessary in the explanation, THEN there is no metric available to determine that design is unnecessary in the explanation, because it is necessarily the same metric.
    Liz (and everyone here) has asserted that – at least currently – there is no such metric.

    If so, the positive claim that Liz made that her evolutionary explanation **is** sufficient **without design** cannot logically be supported, because she has no metric by which to make such a determination.

    You don’t have to know a bit of science to recognize a failure of logic.

    And when I look closely, I see that you are neither talking about a metric that will tell us whether a designer was necessary for a phenomenon, nor whether it is necessarily true that a thing was designed, but for something that will tell us whether “design is necessary in an explanation”. And I’m honestly foxed as to what this might mean.

    Do you mean: a measure that will tell us whether the correct explanation must involve a designer? In which case, you have misunderstood my claim. I am not claiming that the correct explanation does not involve a designer, and my claim had nothing to do with any “metric” at all. My claim is simply that because we have to hand a hypothesis for how functional complexity can arise without input from an intentional designer, and because that hypothesis has a great deal of predictive power, there is no necessity, right now, to postulate a designer in addition to the non-design mechanisms we have in order to account for functional complexity – that would be to get the wrong side of Occam’s razor.

    I am not saying that designers are unnecessary for biological organisms, but that, given the power of our hypothesis, it is unnecessary for us to posit one! We have plenty of potential non-design mechanisms, including chemistry and physics for the origin of life, and Darwinian mechanisms to generate functional complexity thereafter to keep us going for a considerable time. The day may yet dawn when we have to sit back and say: we’re all out of mechanisms; we just can’t figure out how this thing could have come together, perhaps there is some intelligent, intentional process that we’ve missed that we need to investigate to solve this.

    But right now, there is no necessity.

    And, even more importantly, perhaps, even if we never did have such a necessity – even if we had a near-perfect theory that accounted for everything, mud to man, Big Bang to Beethoven, we still wouldn’t have demonstrated that the whole thing was not designed. Only that we had an explanation in which a designer did not need to be invoked.

    Which might bespeak a pretty fine designer.

  39. Yes, you’re missing something. It doesn’t matter what the metric is, or even if it produces any reliable results. The argument is that **whatever** metric you use (whether it is a reliable metric or not) to make your determination (A), logically that same metric can be used to make the opposing determination (not-A).

    It doesn’t matter if the way you are determining citizenship is by observing who has a hat on; or who is 6′ tall, or whomever smells like taffee. The argument is about the dichotomous nature of any claim of not-A; it requires a metric of some sort – some kind of evaluation, whether reliable or not – that can also be used to make a determination of A.

    It’s simple, inescapable logic. Even if the metric is subjective and vague, as in “nobody who looks over 40 is allowed in the club”, the metric being applied by the bouncer or bouncers is still dichotomous in nature. They’ll let some people in and other will be kept out, regardless of their actual ages, because the bouncers will be making necessarily dichotomous judgements based upon the metric being used.

  40. WJM:

    You have a metric above that is used for making a determination about whether or not a tumor is cancerous. That metric makes a determination, right or wrong; is cancer necessary to explain what we see in the tumor, as arbited by our metric? Yes = a finding that cancer is necessary in the explanation of what we see; No = cancer is not necessary in the explanation of what we see…

    …it’s about the epistemological nature of dichotomous, determining metrics, if they have no means of determining a “not-A” value, then it has no way of determining something as having the value of A.

    And:

    The argument is that **whatever** metric you use (whether it is a reliable metric or not) to make your determination (A), logically that same metric can be used to make the opposing determination (not-A).

    William,

    Sure, it’s possible in principle to have a test where “Yes” means “this thing must be designed” and “No” means “this thing doesn’t require design”.

    Here’s what you’re overlooking:

    1. It’s possible in principle to have a dichotomous test where “Yes” means “this thing must be designed” and “No” means “this thing may or may not require design.”

    2. It’s possible in principle to have a dichotomous test where “Yes” means “this thing may or may not require design” and “No” means “this thing does not require design.”

  41. Steve:
    Lizzie, organisms always produce viable offspring.

    No, they don’t 🙂 I jolly nearly didn’t, but amazingly, managed a fairly fine specimen on my last egg. However, I know many organisms that weren’t as lucky as I was.

    There is no ‘advantage’ gained.The advantage is embedded in the organism’s ability to produce more offspring than will survive.There is bound to be one that survives and the rest is donated to the food chain; ie rabbits produce several to keep a couple, snakes produce hundreds to keep several, roaches produce thousands to keep dozens; etc. etc.

    I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. Many organisms die offspringless, and of those that don’t, many produce offspring that do not survive to maturity. On average, for a population to persist, there needs to be at least a replacement rate, but that is by no means assured, as we know from the vast majority of populations that go extinct. Almost everything you have said here is incorrect – which is puzzling to me, because I’m sure you know this, so I’m wondering what you meant to say! Could you rephrase?

    It is not a matter of slightly more efficient cecal valves but the fact that no cecal valves were present.However, when the lizards were transplanted to a new environment, they developed cecal valves.They didn’t start with slighly more efficent valves but started with no valves at all.Different animals.

    Yes, I know that the original population did not have cecal valves. A cecal valve is a morphological gut feature that slows food transit time, and increase the amount of nutrients that are released from vegetation. Any individual lizard, therefore, with even a hint of valviness about their gut is going to have a better time in an environment where the main food source is vegetable than one with no such hint. The more efficient the gut is at slowing the food, the better that individual will do, and the more offspring it is likely to leave. Interestingly, cecal valves are found in several lizard species, so most of the potential genes for creating such things were probably already present – an example of how a new environment makes existing traits useful, and therefore prevalent, as opposed to a new trait being useful de novo.

    In fact, bird beaks became increasingly larger, not just a single instance of a slightly larger beak.And when there was no need for the larger beaks, they shrunk back to the original size.

    No beak shrank. Mean beak size decreased. Have you read The Beak of the Finch?

    So there is nothing about birds taking an advantage of anything, but a systematic adjustment to a changing environment.

    Absolutely right. No birds take an advantage. What happens is that beak sizes that happen to be advantageous become more prevalent. And we call this the population “adapting”. It is the population that adapts, not the individuals.

    To assert that ‘they just so happened to have a slighly larger beak and that one was more successful so it expanded in the population’ is a sterile concept.They didn’t just so happen to leave offspring with an advantage but it is a deliberate process that happens again and again.

    How do you know? Why is “they just so happend to have a slightly larger beak” a “sterile concept”? Do read the book – the Grants actually had a complete genealogy of every finch on the island, and so they knew exactly who inherited beaks from whom, and which unfortunates died eggless when the seeds were the wrong size for their beaks. It’s fascinating.

    Again organism are not ‘more likely’ to leave a few viable offspring’.They ALWAYS do.

    No, they don’t. Sadly. Do read that book. It tells you exactly how many offspring each finch left, and whether they were viable. And surely you know of organisms that failed to leave offspring? Do you really not know of a single person who died childless?

    By now we can see that what you are saying is simply not true.James Shapiro’s research provides compelling evidence that in fact organism do in fact engineer the genomes to adapt.

    Well, no. Shapiro’s research is certainly very interesting, but his very weakest evidence is that genomes are adapted in the germline to adapt to changing environments. He does cite evidence that as populations reduce in numbers, the number of extreme phenotypes can increase, because of inbreeding (this also applies to the cecal valve story), making adaptation of the population potentially more rapid (it also makes extinction more likely!) It’s also just possible that certain environmental stressors might tend to produce a certain kind of variant that tends to be able to cope better in that environment, and that this itself might tend to evolve at population level, but the evidence right now is far from “compelling”. And even if true (it would be cool), would be evidence for evolution at between-population level (Shapiro’s point) as well as within-population level. Which I think is really interesting, and why I have always been a fan of Shapiro!

    The amount of offspring and the frequency of generation is the genomes tool for spreading the correct mutations at the correct time.Cecal valves and bird beaks speak to this ability.

    Yes, this is basically true. Alleles that confer traits that serve their bearers badly in the current environment will tend to become rarer, while those that confer traits that serve their bearers well, will tend tend to be come more common – resulting in optimized beaks and guts.

    No need to posit a designer, only the existence of embedded intelligence. All we have to do is look at bacterial colonies that act as a single organism, where each cell communicates with the rest of the colony at a distance to understand the concept of embedded intelligence.

    Absolutely. I consider evolutionary processes a form of embedded intelligence.

    Ultimately, ‘advantageous mutations spreading throughout a population’ has been a clever argument but at the end of the day, a false one.

    No, it’s a perfectly good one, and has been empirically confirmed, both in the lab and in the field.

  42. Steve,

    Again organism are not ‘more likely’ to leave a few viable offspring’. They ALWAYS do.

    Have you heard of ‘extinction’? 99.9% of all the species that have ever existed are now extinct.

  43. William J. Murray:
    Yes, you’re missing something. It doesn’t matter what the metric is, or even if it produces any reliable results. The argument is that **whatever** metric you use (whether it is a reliable metric or not) to make your determination (A), logically that same metric can be used to make the opposing determination (not-A).

    It doesn’t matter if the way you are determining citizenship is by observing who has a hat on; or who is 6′ tall, or whomever smells like taffee.The argument is about the dichotomous nature of any claim of not-A; it requires a metric of some sort – some kind of evaluation, whether reliable or not – that can also be used to make a determination of A.

    It’s simple, inescapable logic. Even if the metric is subjective and vague, as in “nobody who looks over 40 is allowed in the club”, the metric being applied by the bouncer or bouncers is still dichotomous in nature. They’ll let some people in and other will be kept out, regardless of their actual ages, because the bouncers will be making necessarily dichotomous judgements basedupon the metric being used.

    You are assuming that all measures are coterminous with the thing we want to detect.

    If the nightclub rule is “no person who looks over 40 is allowed” – then, by definition, a person who looks over 40 (the measure) is a person who is not allowed in the club (the thing you are trying to detect)

    But no measures in science are like this. All measures are proxies. In science what is being detected is not defined by the measure. If the nightclub rule was “nobody over 40” and the measure was “how old someone looks” we’d have a proxy measure for the thing we are really interested in (how old someone is), and thus, inevitably, measurement error. Therefore, we set a criterion: If we want to be absolutely sure we don’t let in anybody over 40, we set the criterion as “looks over 30”. That way we can be pretty sure that nobody in the club is over 40. However, we can’t be nearly as sure that everyone we bounced was over 40.

    You can, in other words say: our test is positive, so this person is person is club-eligible; however, you cannot say: our test is negative, so this person is not club-eligible. They might well be a perfectly eligible 35 year old who looks her age.

    In science, all measurements are proxy measurements. We don’t get to define our entities by our measurements; we have to detect our entities by means of our measurements.

  44. William J. Murray:
    Yes, you’re missing something. It doesn’t matter what the metric is, or even if it produces any reliable results. The argument is that **whatever** metric you use (whether it is a reliable metric or not) to make your determination (A), logically that same metric can be used to make the opposing determination (not-A).

    It doesn’t matter if the way you are determining citizenship is by observing who has a hat on; or who is 6′ tall, or whomever smells like taffee.The argument is about the dichotomous nature of any claim of not-A; it requires a metric of some sort – some kind of evaluation, whether reliable or not – that can also be used to make a determination of A.

    It’s simple, inescapable logic. Even if the metric is subjective and vague, as in “nobody who looks over 40 is allowed in the club”, the metric being applied by the bouncer or bouncers is still dichotomous in nature. They’ll let some people in and other will be kept out, regardless of their actual ages, because the bouncers will be making necessarily dichotomous judgements basedupon the metric being used.

    You are asserting a universal. As I’m sure you know, universals can’t be proved with an example, but they can be refuted with a counterexample, which I gave. You did not address my counterexample or show why it was invalid. Instead you gave your own example. But your example conflates a decision heuristic with a claim of knowledge about some state of affairs ascertained via some metric (which as Lizzie points out are always proxies for the thing in question). I agree with you that decision heuristics are often binary or dichotomous. In my example, if I’m a Customs officer tasked with only allowing U.S. citizens to pass, then if you have a passport you get in, and if you don’t you don’t. So, like your night club example, my test for who gets in also necessarily defines who doesn’t. But this is now abstracted from our original question, which was about who is a citizen or not, or, in your example, who is 40 or not. Using a metric to assist in making a binary decision about what action to take relative to an A or not-A scenario is not the same thing as making an epistemological claim about what we actually know about A or not-A on the basis of that same metric. My counterexample stands.

Leave a Reply