Every camp in the ‘biological origins debate’ has its own explanation(s) as to where the complexity and diversity of life comes from. Some of these explanations would seem to be driven by prior commitments and ideologies (on both sides) and in some cases (notably from the DI and over at UD) they are part of a bigger assault on the opposing viewpoints perceived commitments themselves.
So what makes for a good explanation? Here’s a couple of resources I found interesting:
http://www.culturallogic.com/research-links/
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2009/12/explanations-gentle-introduction_28.html
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-good-is-explanation-part-1.html
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2010/06/what-good-is-explanation-part-2.html
Perhaps we could have a discussion on what makes for a good explanation and look at the various available explanations for biological origins in this framework?
[Multiple edits]
I think that to say that an explanation is rather specific–or at least as specific as possible–is important. A “general cause” at best might point toward an explanation, it can’t be the explanation.
So we can say that humans do this or that, or that humanoids do by analogy, but to say “intelligence” does a class of actions isn’t an explanation. Partly because we only know one sort of intelligent being that fits the category without caveats, but it seems doubtful that it could mean much as a general “explanation” even if we knew of many alien intelligences. Being within the category of “intelligent actions” might point toward an explanation, however it wouldn’t be an explanation, or at best would be a highly inadequate explanation.
We could probably consider life to be within the possible range of intelligent productions, in fact, yet the lack of any specific known cause would make it problematic even without any alternatives. Evolution’s specificity, particularly in the cladistic branching patterns of life that lacks substantial horizontal genetic transfer* is what is really telling as an explanation. A vague, general “intelligence might do it” versus a specific explanation of the patterns, and highly derivative adaptations in life, leaves no contest regarding which is the better explanation.
Glen Davidson
*Not something occurring in the “evolution” of technology, of course.
Some years ago a croissant came out of the oven in the Midwest that vaguely resembled a woman wearing a shawl. There were 2 possible explanations:
1. It was random, and humans have tendency to see patterns.
2. The disembodied consciousness of a woman who died 2000 years ago in the middle east chose, for some unknown reason, to mold the bread as it baked so that it would resemble her.
Many people went with explanation #2 and the croisssant sold for ~$20,000 on ebay. Is there a rigorous way we can state that one explanation is better than the other?
Well, going all meta and stuff*, we can choose attributes that we think a good explanation may have, but they’re not really grounded in anything but preference. Explaining what makes a good explanation is self-referential, take that materialists, ergo God!
*Deep philosophical terms
Explanations don’t explain.
As the saying goes, it’s turtles all the way down. An explanation just adds another turtle.
Then how do we understand things?
Do we?
I think the best approach to defining “explanation” is to look at the interface of science and technology.
A explanation is a statement that is useful about the relationship among phenomena. The usefulness might show itself in technology and gadgets, or it might show itself by enabling predictions of future phenomena.
Or it might produce expectations, as in telling a story about history in such a way as to predict corroborating evidence of the history.
The title should read: IDT & Explanations. Don’t forget this is a (supposedly ‘scientific’) ‘theory,’ as IDist Cameron Wybrow and many others regularly do.
The ‘theory’ called uppercase ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ (IDT) is supposedly a strictly natural scientific explanation.
That’s laughable to Aquinas & most contemporary Abrahamic believers.
I would say that ID proponents see IDT as a method of detection, not an explanation per se.
Explanation comes from those who know the answer.
God knows. God told us in the bible certain things. nature does not and can not contradict the witness save where incompetence is at work.
The origin struggle is based on weighing the evidence of nature and disagreeing about the weights.
The first thing should be the observation of the great complexity and diversity of biology etc. its a powerful point about mechanisms to create great things.
Its there and historically man concluded a thinking being(s) could only do it.
Today we say the same thing and some say nay. Further they nay the bible.
Its up to the new crowd , evolutionists, to prove nature is from chance encounters.
Their explanation must veto ours and do a good job.
not just say to us WHY NOT EVOLUTION by steps of trivial changes.
Forget about what makes for a good explanation. Given an irrational universe, whence explanation itself? Why should anything need an explanation and why should any particular explanation be meaningful or any better than any other? It’s not ID that is anti-science, it’s atheism that is anti-science.
However, in the spirit of the OP I offer the following:
A good explanation brings clarity. “It just happened, that’s all” isn’t very clear, but that’s Darwinian evolution in a nutshell.
In the news:
White House urged to explain why it did not heed healthcare site warnings
Religon explained in under 2 mins by Monty Python
I tend to think that an explanation is a model of a phenomena, that explains by virtue of telling us why observable regularities hold, to the extent that they do, and also why there are observed irregularities, to the extent that there are any. The “goodness” of an explanation consists in such things as: how smoothly does it fit the data? what novel predictions does it generate? if it postulates unobserved entities or processes, how might we test for them? does it guide further research? how well does it compare with competing explanations? how consistent is it with well-established explanations? and so on.
Ah, so ID and atheism are two different sides of the same coin?
While this has been known for a long time, it’s nice to hear it stated so plainly from an ID supporter.
ID = religion.
I only hope you are available for the next court case!
I’m impressed by David Deutsch’s point that “good explanations are hard to vary”. That is to say, if you twiddle the input knobs of causes and there is not much change in the output effects, then you propbably have a bad explanation.
This is the case with ID. The cause (“intelligent designer”) can be made to take on pretty much any set of what, when, where, how and why values, and the effects (what we observe) change not at all. ID as an explanation is easy to vary, and likely to be a bad explanation as a result.
Mung, please try and keep your posts on topic if you’d be so kind? You won’t be edited or disemvoweled, so please show a little restraint. Thanks!
I think the sandbox is a free-for-all?
What can I say Richard. I think it’s pretty short-sighted to insist that we restrict ourselves to discussing what makes for a good explanation and refusing to address why explanations are even necessary or even desirable. Is that just some “self-evident truth” that just isn’t evident to me?
Or is it a self-evident truth that not everything is a self-evident truth?
But it’s your thread.
When you have a good explanation for why we need any explanations at all I’ll be happy to re-join.
p.s. I guess it was your inclusion of “ID” in the title of your OP that threw me off.
If you don’t mean to include Intelligent Design don’t put it in the title of your OP.
Cheers
Why we want explanations at all is an interesting and important question, but it is a different question than what makes an explanation a good or bad one.
Presumably, that we have a legitimate cognitive interest in explanations in the first place, and therefore prefer good explanations over bad ones, is part of the common ground between those who think that order or form precedes its material instantiation and those who think that order or form is itself generated through spatio-temporal processes. (I’m trying to avoid “-isms” here and get down to the content of the views involved.) Thinkers on both sides of that question already take it for granted that we are, and ought to be, interested in explanations — so it’s not a point of contention.
I agree, KN. Explanations are desirable, especially “good” ones.
Here’s a list of explanatory virtues:
Testability – a good explanatory hypothesis should be testable.
Consistency with background knowledge – a good explanatory hypothesis should not contradict our background knowledge.
Past explanatory success – a good explanatory hypothesis should fit within a tradition with much past explanatory success.
Simplicity – a good explanatory hypothesis should be simple, not making lots of ad-hoc assumptions.
Ontological economy – a good explanatory hypothesis should not add more previously unknown things to our ontology than necessary.
Informativeness – a good explanatory hypothesis should allow us to deduce precise details of its effects.
Predictive novelty – a good explanatory hypothesis should be able to predict not just known facts, but previously unknown facts.
Explanatory scope – a good explanatory hypothesis should explain a wide range of data.
Explanatory power – a good explanatory hypothesis should make the evidence we observe highly probable, not just slightly probable.
From – http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=5463#sthash.KzfGyZO9.dpuf
What makes ye of these?
It’s clear that ID-ers think ‘natural’ mechanisms of descent and winnowing of descendants make for a poor explanation of both complexity and diversity. “it just happened – Darwinism in a nutshell” (H/T Mung). I always find it odd that the counter-explanation – “it was just designed” – seems to be perfectly satisfactory to the same critics.
The difference, I think, is that the IDer is not even looking for an explanation. They are looking for, or seeing, evidence of something greater than themselves, greater also than the mere mechanical processes of biology. Import that, and everything is explained as its choice.
The evolutionary process contains a large portion of probabilistic, statistical consideration, which can render specific causal explanation difficult. For example, we can draw graphs of road death vs alcohol consumption or speed and demonstrate a statistical causal link, but cannot conclusively attribute this or that death or survival to this or that causal factor. Moreover, by its very nature evolution eliminates much of the evidence of its own action. We are left only with survivors. As a very broad statement, descent with modification is a good and plausible ‘explanation’ for both diversity and the relations of modern forms to each other and to fossils. But in specific, detailed accounts of history it loses traction, because we rarely have access to the selective arena.
Some IDers import ID in the ‘modification’ part. It’s descent, but guided. Which is possible, but no better an explanation. Whatever critiques one may cast in the direction of the ‘natural’ explanation bounce back (with the additional issue of an unknown causal mechanism: the Designer’s never-explained modus operandi). Cryptic operation of statistical biases and cryptic operation of Designer preference are difficult (I’d say impossible) to separate out after the fact. But we can see biased and unbiased ‘natural’ population sampling in operation, and model it mathematically and computationally. It has the advantage of being unequivocally real.
This illustrates my point, that explanations don’t explain. “It was just designed” is an explanation, albeit a bogus one. Whereas the scientific account, as an explanation, amounts to “it just happened.”
An explanation should be teleological, not mechanical. Scientific explanations are mechanical, so they fail to be explanations. They are far more valuable than mere explanations, precisely because they are mechanical. The reaction of ID folk amounts to “Don’t give me all of that mechanical detail; I wanted an explanation.”
In this context, I prefer to think of an “explanation” as a description of the mechanism or set of mechanisms that account for an observed phenomenon; together with the evidence for the operation of it/them.
Evolution has plenty of observed mechanisms with evidence for their operation, Although there is a dearth of these for the origins of life, feasible mechanisms have been described.
ID has nothing like this. Whatever flavour of ID is being touted, it depends on supernatural interference (whatever buggering about with the meaning of “supernatural” is attempted) with no feasible mechanisms postulated. This cannot be an “explanation”; merely a speculation or unsupported assertion.
Intelligent design isn’t not a explanation. At best it’s a proposal for where an explanation might be found. For one thing, it doesn’t have any of the explanatory virtues that Richard Hughes pointed out. The superficial plausibility of ID derives entirely from a weak argument from analogy and criticisms of a shallow grasp of (what is variously referred to as) “Darwinism,” “materialism,” “naturalism,” etc. It is not even an explanation, much less a good one, and even less a better one than the alternatives.
By contrast, creationism is an explanation, just a very bad one. The reason why it is false that “intelligent design is creationism in a cheap tuxedo” is that creationism is a genuine explanation, just a very bad one, whereas intelligent design is not even an explanation at all in the first place.
I have nothing to add to the last few posts. I like them.
Having said that, it occurs to me that I don’t like the term mechanical.
Explanation has causation buried in its assumptions, along with all its baggage. I think causation is best discussed as regularity. I see nothing added by positing something other than regular relationships among phenomena.
Well, part of the the ID argument is regularity. They say ‘in our experience, intelligence creates information’. And it often it does. I’d argue so do many natural forces, and I’d need a robust definition to see if they were intelligent – evolution may be intelligent. Also, they cherry pick – for their examples its always a *biological* intelligence at work – a specificity that is obvious yet they elect to ignore.
So I think we need two types of explanation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanandum
I don’t see this at all. It seems to be a difference of definition, but I see regularity in nature as implying a lack of purpose or direction or agency.
My thinking is regularity as in “information is always [regularly] produced by intelligence”. It is perhaps equivocal?
As I see it, science comes up with methods that allow us to describe, predict and control nature. And then it wraps a story around those methods. It’s the story, not the methods, that we call an explanation. But it is still just a made-up story, containing no more fact of that matter than does the Adam and Eve story.
Newton’s story was that there is a force of attraction between massive bodies. He was criticized for reliance on occult forces. Einstein’s story was that there isn’t a force, but the massive bodies distort the fabric of space-time in their vicinity.
We can test which makes better predictions. But that’s just testing the mathematical equations in the more direct descriptions of the effects of gravity. There’s no way to tell if there is actually a force, or if there is actually a fabric of space time such as could be distorted.
The important science is in the description and in the prediction and control. It isn’t in the stories that we wrap around those.
Information can be produced by people, but I’m at something of a loss as to what “intelligence” is. we really don’t have much understanding of what intelligence is, other than we know it when we see it.
You could operationalize intelligence. I think ID advocates resist that.
By regular processes, I intend to mean processes in nature that can be described by equations or laws or systematic relationships. In other words, not capricious and not the result of capricious agency.
Aiguy/RDFish has beaten this to death many times at ARN, Telic Thoughts and UD. Intelligence as a concept is undefined.
However anyone tries to operationalize a measurable, definable real concept calling it intelligence, it will be rejected by ID proponents. Look at Lizzie’s experience with “Upright Biped” and trying to pin him down to specifics.
Aiguy’s point is you don’t need intelligence as a term; you can concentrate on the realities of picking apart brain function without needing an overarching category description. Same with “life”. Biologists don’t worry about “what is life’!
Are dinosaurs just the stories paleontologists use to predict where to find fossils?
LOL.
The stories are not used to predict. They are for marketing (selling your theory to others). Yes, there were actual dinosaurs, but I think you’ll agree that the stories are somewhat embellished. It wasn’t too long ago that brontosaurus was the centerpiece of any dinosaur exhibit. And now it is known that brontosaurus was a mistake (misclassified).
I don’t think it is fair to characterize the positive quality of fallibility in science as embellishment (I assume you are referring to science, not TV shows, of course).
I posted the example about dinosaurs (taken from Tim Maudlin) because I think your characterization of science is too limited. When we go outside of physics to biology which is the context for this thread, science can center around mechanistic explanations, and not just mathematical laws, as also pointed out by damitail2. I think this is how many biologists work. Philosophers of biology have capture this, eg Bechtel:
As the dinosaur example illustrates, I also think scientists build these explanations to understand real entities in the world, not just to create formula for prediction. ( I know not all philosophers agree that the entities in scientific explanations are real).
Further, function and purpose can be part of such explanations: bees dance to show other bees where to locate pollen. The function of the heart is to digest blood. We just need to recognize that the origin of purpose and function in these explanations is natural selection.
As the OP pointed out, we do need to consider different types of explanation. For example, a standard argument in ID is to criticize evolution because it is not expressed solely as mathematical laws. But demanding that scientific explanation must be laws is not correct.
(I am also leaving aside aspects of evolution which do have mathematical laws, like population genetics).
My original comment was never intended to be about dinosaurs. It was intended to be about theories, not about actual evidence. I actually stated it as being about methods.
BruceS,
I take it that you are calling into question the positivist account on which explanations consist of laws for making predictions based on observations. And this has two problems: (1) it treats the posited unobservables as mere fictions (one may think here of Quine’s remark about physical objects and the Greek gods); (2) not all explanations are law-based. Nancy Cartwright has gone ever further to question the law-based model of explanation even for physics.
I agree with both lines of criticism, realist that I am, but I’m not entirely sure if Neil intended to commit himself to the positivist account — though if may look that way. (Petrushka frequently says things that sound like logical positivism to me, but I doubt this is intentional.)
I’m not really a positivist. There’s much where I disagree. But I do share their suspicion of metaphysics.
I do, and I don’t, depending on what one means by “metaphysics.”
On the one hand, I think that metaphysics is unavoidable, if it just means the most basic categories of reality as understood at a particular stage of human inquiry. On the other hand, it is eminently avoidable, and wisely avoided, if it’s just theology under a different name. The positivists did not, I think, appreciate the possibility of metaphysics in the first sense as much as they could have. So I am suspicious of their suspicion. 🙂
There are no “basic categories.” The world comes without categories. The division into categories is something that we do, not something that is given. So categories and categorization should be considered epistemology, rather than metaphysics.
I see what you mean, and I don’t exactly disagree. But I don’t fully agree, either.
As I see it, in doing metaphysics we are concerned with the categorical framework that best articulates our encounters with reality (both theoretical and practical encounters are meant here, of course).
It does not follow from this that the world, is itself categorically structured. If one were to insist that metaphysics just is discovering the categorical structure of the world as it is given to us — which is, of course, what Aristotle mean by “first philosophy” — then I would quite happily share your suspicion of metaphysics.
The reason I don’t share those suspicions entirely is because I see plenty of room for a different, non-Aristotelian project — in fact a Kantian/post-Kantian project — that nevertheless merits the term “metaphysics” by virtue of its generality, rather than by virtue of its peering beyond the veil of experience (for there is no such veil).
On this picture, metaphysics is the concern with our categories and also categories of what is. The unavoidable anthropocentrism that Kant initiated and pragmatism continues shouldn’t dissuade us from distinguishing between (a) what we say about what is the case, and (b) what we say about how we know what is the case. So even us pragmatists can distinguish, in our own terms, between epistemology and metaphysics.
I’m not a philosopher, so I don’t know how you use those terms.
However, you really cannot separate the two in any important way. They are mutually entwined. If you change your categories, that changes the statements that can be considered to be true. So they have to be taken together as a package deal.
Of course — and if I had said that they were separable, you’d be right to correct me. However, I only said that they are distinct — metaphysics and epistemology can be both distinct and inseparable.
I have the same view about the relation between theoretical philosophy (epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind/language/science) and practical philosophy (ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics) — distinct but inseparable — and both from the study of the history of philosophy.
Being a generalist in a profession dominated by specialists, mine is a minority view.
Richardthughes:
But you have no good explanation for why that should be the case. You don’t consider that to be a problem for this entire exercise?
I’d like to propose the following:
1. That we need an explanation for why explanations are “desirable.” A good explanation for why explanations are desirable would be even more desirable.
2. That what constitutes a good explanation depends upon why we desire an explanation in the first place.
Kantian Naturalist:
Of course it’s a different question, but that doesn’t ipso facto render my introduction of the question off-topic.
Surely desiring an explanation must have an evolutionary explanation which can be cashed out simply in terms of it’s utility in who leaves more offspring. And what difference does it makes if the explanation is “good” or “bad” as long as the effect is slightly selectively advantageous?
I don’t see why someone who accepts evolutionary explanations as correct for biological functions in general would therefore need to accept that our cognitive interest in explanations itself must have an evolutionary explanation. Our ability to explain, and our preference for good explanations over bad ones, could be a cultural practice with no obvious biological counterpart. After all, there’s no biological explanation for our ability to build and fly airplanes, or why European and American men no longer wear make-up.
Kantian Naturalist,
You raise interesting questions.
I agree, the one does not follow from the other. But that would mean that our cognitive interest in explanations is not itself a biological function, wouldn’t it?
I suspect that someone who accepts ID has no problem with that. But someone who rejects ID might have a different opinion on the matter, and that is why I think it’s relevant.
Well, if Darwinism doesn’t suffice, you’re not going to find me objecting!
Which came first, do you think? Our desire for an explanation or our ability to explain? Did the two evolve together?
Bless you Mung. I figured it would be you or WJM who wanted a good explanation as to why we like good explanations. Perhaps you can identify why, within yourself?
Why do you quote the bible at UD if you believe in a non-interventionist designer. The only deity mentioned in that book is interventionist.
Mung,
You won’t find anyone objecting. No-one, not even supposed ‘arch-Darwinists’ like Dawkins, believes or argues that everything people do can be reduced to historic selective advantage of their inherited genes.