I’m ambivalent to the question whether ID is or is not science. I don’t care how it is classified. The more important question is whether it is true. Even though in some people’s definition of science, ID might count as science, in other people’s definition of science it won’t count as science. Therefore, just to be safe and avoid pointless arguments, ID should not be promoted as science even by IDists.
Certainly IDists use scientific findings to advocate their assertions, but that doesn’t make ID science any more than a police investigator using science makes the police investigator a scientist.
What I view as representative scientific disciplines of investigation:
1. applied and theoretical electro magnetic theory
2. quantum chemistry
3. thermodynamics for heating and air conditioners and nuclear reactors
4. celestial mechanics
etc.
These involve hypotheses, predictions and experiments. ID does not have direct experiments because the mechanism (the Designer), even if He exists, usually chooses not to show up in such experiments.
Not every truth claim about the physical universe is accessible to science. I claim Socrates was a real person as Plato described, however, we only have Plato’s testimony to rely on. Even if Socrates was a real person, and even if there is credible evidence to that effect, such questions about the physical universe are outside science.
If the design of life came about by mechanisms outside those that can be demonstrated in laboratory experiment and are outside physical laws of chemistry and physics, then even if ID were true, ID might not be properly called science. Therefore I think ID should not be promoted as science.
ID is hypothesis, a claim about the physical universe.
This is my view:
Perhaps, however, one just really does not want to call intelligent design a scientific theory. Perhaps one prefers the designation “quasi-scientific historical speculation with strong metaphysical overtones.” Fine. Call it what you will, provided the same appellation is applied to other forms of inquiry that have the same methodological and logical character and limitations. In particular, make sure both design and descent are called “quasi-scientific historical speculation with strong metaphysical overtones.”
This may seem all very pointless, but that in a way is just the point. As Laudan has argued, the question whether a theory is scientific is really a red herring. What we want to know is not whether a theory is scientific but whether a theory is true or false, well confirmed or not, worthy of our belief or not.
Stephen Meyer
http://www.arn.org/docs/meyer/sm_methodological.htm
Does it really help IDists to claim they have a “Positive case for ID” and that “ID is science”? When I’ve witnessed debates on the topics, the IDists have lost. Why? They get bogged down in arguments over definitions rather than delivering discussions about the computer-like, well-engineered systems within biology and why such systems must transcend laws of physics and chemistry as a matter of principle. Therefore, ID should not be promoted as science.
PS
With respect to the public school science issue:
I’ll wager a bottle of single-malt scotch, should it ever go to trial whether ID may legitimately be taught in public school science curricula, that ID will pass all constitutional hurdles.
Bill Dembski
Being an advantage player, I should have taken that wager. I’d certainly like to upgrade my collection of scotch whiskey’s to be more like Richard Hughes’.
You’re welcome, keiths.
Oh really.
So what about the context changed any damned thing about the quoted bit? He only reaffirms his earlier claim that life appears designed, by saying “all appearances to the contrary” physics designed life, that all complicated machines are due to life, etc. etc.
No he doesn’t leave it there, since he knows about evolution. Duh. But the context doesn’t really change the point made by the short quote, which is that life “appears designed,” when there is no objective (rather than cultural) reason to say so. It’s idiotic to claim that we accepted it uncritically, when I know that I’ve read (skimmed, at least) the relevant passage, and I think it likely that Lizzie did.
He just keeps affirming that life appears designed in various ways in the longer version, possibly to make the evolutionary processes seem more amazing, or some such thing.
Glen Davidson
Naw, the problem is not whether Dawkins is an asshole and an idiot, or not — the problem is that our friend Religion_of_pieces stated something untrue: “he *defines* biology as ‘the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose’ “. {bolding mine]
But that’s not true, not even in the quotemine as given; Dawkins does not DEFINE biology. It’s not merely that he avoids using the intro-textbook phrase “biology is defined as …”. It’s that his purpose in writing the book was never to define biology as a field of study, but rather to talk about what biology, having already been studied since Darwin, can be shown to mean — that is, to signify — in the context of our (non-creationist) view of ourselves and our living world. If the distinction isn’t clear to you, blame Dawkins, not me. I think he shares the fault of many classic-educated Englishmen, which is a tendency to be too circuitous and thereby obscuring his own point. Okay, blame me, too, because I obviously share the same fault. But keiths got it, the difference between “defining” and “talking about”.
I don’t like Dawkins as a person and I think that he’s neither a great biologist (clearly he isn’t) nor a great atheist Thought Leader. What I can’t stand, though, is the notorious creationist quotemines being taken for granted. So I did my scout good deed for the day and dug in for the truth.
It’s clear from the rest of the paragraphs that Dawkins categorically denies any possibility of ID being a valid answer to the question “how did our complicated biology get here?”. If Religion_of_pieces had made a modest claim such as “some biologists say things about life having the appearance of design” then Dawkins would indeed be supporting evidence for RoP’s claim. But even with that minor concession, on the very same page, Dawkins denies what RoP infers from the “appearance of design”; Dawkins specifically says that the idea of a Conscious Designer is “wrong, gloriously wrong”.
What Dawkins intends us to see in his words is diametrically opposed to what Religion_of_pieces wants us to assume — from that one quotemined sentence — that Dawkins would believe about the possible validity of ID as an explanation.
Scroll up and remember that RoP began this subthread with this ridiculous bit:
No, RoP does not get to use Dawkins’ book as any kind of support whatsoever for any of that bit except the three words “appearance of design” and even there, Dawkins doesn’t mean what RoP hopes he means. Dishonest creationist quotemining? Color me surprised.
Yes, that’s the point exactly: Dawkins starting his book by noting the problem of apparent design needs a satisfactory explanation — in order to make the evolutionary explanation seem more satisfying once we finally get there — is the same structure of expository literature followed by Darwin (and other famous science writers). And of course Darwin is also viciously quotemined by creationists, who either don’t understand or deliberately lie about the intention of the author and the fact that the author raises the bar of the problem as high as possible, only to answer it later with greater effect. It would be a shame if we were as sloppy as the creationists in our readings.
You don’t have to like Dawkins’ style of educational writing. Shrug. It would be nice if you noticed that his writing is not doing what the creationists/IDists pretend it is.
hotshoe_,
Sigh, I was not claiming that Dawkins is an IDist, I made it quite clear that he is as far away from ID as you can get, he is all the way on the other end of the spectrum so far as design is concerned. Nevertheless, he concedes that things give the appearance of design, (as did Francis Crick), in fact, the study of things that give the appearance of design is for Dawkins the very definition of biology!
When biologists come back to the real world, they all acknowledge that things look designed (Crick says biologists must constantly remind themselves that they only look designed, but are really not). Evolutionists, such as Ayala claim that Darwin was brilliant, precisely because he supposedly explained this appearance of design away without the need for an actual designer. (spoiler alert, Darwin of course, did no such thing)
No it’s not. Pay attention.
Words mean things. “Definition” means something, and it’s not what you’re trying to make it mean while distorting Dawkins’ intention.
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edit to remove a guano-ish line.
In short, the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we’re on the lookout for very simple signals. That’s mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.
Seth Shostak in 2005. (He’s Senior Astronomer and Director, Center for SETI Research.)
Nonsense. Life on Earth is designed. By the environment. God may have designed the environment for that purpose but that is not a scientific question.
Alan Fox,
//But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality//
SETI trips over their own foot in their attempt to remain politically correct. This is a strawman, Dembski never said that complexity is a marker for design:
“In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi (1962, pg. 33) considers stones placed in a garden. In one instance the stones spell “Welcome to Wales by British Railways,” in the other they appear randomly strewn. In both instances, the precise arrangement of the stones is vastly improbable. Indeed, any given arrangement of stones is but one of almost infinite possible arrangements. Nonetheless, arrangements of stones that spell coherent English sentences form but a miniscule proportion of the total possible arrangements of stones. The improbability of such arrangements is not properly referred to chance. What is the difference between a randomly strewn arrangement and one that spells a coherent English sentence? Improbability, by itself, isn’t decisive. In addition what’s needed is conformity to a pattern. When stones spell a coherent English sentence, they conform to a pattern. When they are randomly strewn, no pattern is evident. But herein lies a difficulty. Everything conforms to some pattern or other — even a random arrangement of stones. The crucial question, therefore, is whether an arrangement of stones conforms to the right sort of pattern to eliminate chance.”
(William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities, pg. xi (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
hotshoe_,
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose”
^ if that is not a definition, then I don’t know what is.
Specified complexity? Complex specified information? Active information? Behe’s “irreducible complexity”?
Demonstrate to me in astrophysics where nature creates and transmits narrow band signals then.
You really are good at missing the point. If you are your ilk did a bit more insisting on evidence you’d be in a far better place. But you don’t, hence the big tent of contradictions.
And what actual evidence does ID have that the flagellum could not have evolved, exactly? Do remind me.
How would *you* design SETI then? Please, be as specific as you claim they are being vague.
Yep, no surprise that an IDist doesn’t know the difference between defining something and talking about something.
Suit yourself. You’re wrong, but you’re wrong on so many more important points that I think we can agree to let this one go.
P.S. Why on god’s green Earth don’t you learn to blockquote like every other normal person?
Are you just that much of a special snowflake that you don’t have to even bother? Is avoidance of blockquoting something they teach you at IDist school?
Alan Fox,
You seem to have missed Dembski’s points (perhaps deliberately), I will try and help you, here we go again, from Dembski’s own book, published in 1998:
“In *both* instances, the precise arrangement of the stones is vastly improbable. Indeed, any given arrangement of stones is but one of almost infinite possible arrangements. Nonetheless, arrangements of stones that spell coherent English sentences form but a miniscule proportion of the total possible arrangements of stones. The improbability of such arrangements is not properly referred to chance. What is the difference between a randomly strewn arrangement and one that spells a coherent English sentence? Improbability, by itself, isn’t decisive. In addition what’s needed is conformity to a pattern. When stones spell a coherent English sentence, they conform to a pattern.”
Funny, reading that, it seems Dembski is not claiming that we infer design from complexity. Rather, it is conformity to a pattern that is key. Sorry Seth, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. (nice straw man though)
Alan Fox,
//Nonsense. Life on Earth is designed. By the environment.//
Really?
“the overwhelming conclusion of the data collected since 1972 shows that gradual, slow, adaptive change to environments almost never occurs in the fossil record. The prevalence of stasis is still, in my mind, the biggest conundrum that paleontology has posed for evolutionary biology, especially when we can document whole faunas that show absolutely no change despite major changes in their environments (Prothero and Heaton 1996; Prothero 1999; Prothero et al. 2009).” [1]
References:
1. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/ptb/6959004.0001.001/–stephen-jay-gould-did-he-bring-paleontology-to-the-high?rgn=main;view=fulltext
Is there a documented example where design has actually been inferred then? If not, then your statement “we infer design” is untrue.
Sure, it might be true in the general sense of “is this complex motorbike designed” but if you are conflating “design” with “ID-Design” here then you should not. They are not the same at all.
If you claim they in fact are, then what documented example is there where ID as been observed in biology? What “pattern” has design in biology been observed to confirm to?
These are, of course largely rhetorical questions, as I know what I’m asking for does not actually exist. It’s mainly to see how you’ll deal with the fact no such example exists that I’m asking.
Thanks for that & link, Alan. Interesting quote: “We seek artificiality.”
In the IDist worldview, it seems everything is ‘artificial’ simply because it is Designed (i.e. not the same as ‘designed’).
RoP wrote:
Funny that. IDists at the Discovery Institute continually trip over their own feet in being (apparently intentionally) politically incorrect.
OMagain,
How can you be so naive? as a good philosopher once put it:
“The problem with evidence is that what constitutes evidence is not self-evident. Simply put, what counts as evidence is not, and indeed cannot be, decided by evidence. Evidence – that is, what makes a claim evident to us – depends on what we are predisposed to take as evidence”
“The mountains of evidence are already there. The problem is that evidence is itself inherently hermeneutical, influenced by cognitive predispositions to interpret certain types of data as supporting/confirming certain types of conclusions. If one wears materialistic blinders, there can be no evidence for ID hence the constant refrain by people like Barbara Forrest and Eugenie Scott that there is no evidence for ID. There is none for them because they have shut their eyes to it.”
Sure it’s a quote-mine but it’s still stupid. Dawkins says a lot of very stupid things, and he’s even worse now he uses twitter.
Organisms do not “have the appearance of being designed”. The most striking thing about an organism, which distinguishes it from all things we know to have been designed is that it reproduces. The second most striking thing about an organism, which also distinguishes it from designed things, is that its functions serve no apparent use to anyone except itself and its near kin. Hence the concept of “teleonomy” which is crucially different from the “teleology” of designed things, which do not serve any purpose of their own, and are designed and made by an external designer for that designer’s purpose.
Well, that doesn’t help at all. Where does Dembski get his pattern which he uses as a design test? (Remember the explanatory filter failed. CSI fails. We await a demonstration of the power of “active information”)
Tell me what the marks in the image mean using ID methods.
RoP – Do you know what univocal predication is? Have you read Edward Feser’s philosophical critique of IDT? Do you acknowledge that ‘human designer’ and ‘divine designer’ take different categories or do you conflate them?
Right, RoP: What we observe instead, is extremely rapid adaptive changes, accompanied by extremely rapid population growth, which is also exactly what we see in simulations of Darwinian evolution – once a little populaton finds a new niche, it adapts very rapidly and becomes much more numerous. And it approaches an optimum asymptotically – by the time it is numerous enough to have a chance of leaving a fossil record, it’s in the slow tweaking phase – and that’s what we observe.
However, the rapid adaptation phase is so rapid we can actually observe it in real time, in living populations. So we have evidence for both ends of the process.
Elizabeth,
Organisms do not appear to be designed?
Really? Here is another prominent evolutionist: “Organisms fit remarkably well into the external world in which they live. They have morphologies, physiologies and behaviors that appear to have been carefully and artfully designed to enable each organism to appropriate the world around it for its own life (Richard Lewontin)
//been designed is that it reproduces.//
Replication is hard, engineers are working very hard to design self-replicating robots, would your logic follow, say if these engineers succeed one day to design and build a self-replicating robot? Would this mean, it is more likely that such a robot was the product of unguided natural processes?
//no apparent use to anyone except itself and its near kin.//
No one is saying a horse has a purpose, rather, it is the eyes of the horse that has purpose: purpose of sight. The cell is filled with machines that have clear purposes, as Bruce Alberts (no friend of ID!) once pointed out:
“Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts.”
Religion_of_pieces,
You consider Dembski a ‘good philosopher’?! Wow, that’s ‘charitable.’ 😉 It sounds nothing like a scholarly or educated perspective, but it’s certainly charitable. (After all, he was called “the Isaac Newton of information theory” by a fellow evangelical, doesn’t everyone believe that?! 😉 )
I met the guy at the Discovery Institute. In 2 words: boring & unimpressed.
RoP, there are no inerrant scriptures in biology. That fact that Dawkins and Lewontin make a statement does not make them right about biology, or rather, in this case, philosophy. Try Monod instead.
There is a sense in which organisms do resemble things that humans have designed. There are many senses in whicy they do not. Therefore they do not look as though someone designed them. What share, however, as Lewontin points out, are features that optimise them for some end result. In the case of organisms, that result is successful reproduction.
And as reproduction with variation is an optimising process, there is no reason to invoke some external designer as the cause of that optimisation.
Lizzie, I am pointing out that many evolutionists disagree with you, here is another:
“We treat organisms – the parts at least – as if they were manufactured, as if they were designed, and then we try to work out their functions. End-directed thinking – teleological thinking – is appropriate in biology because, and only because, organisms seem as if they were manufactured, as if they had been created by an intelligence and put to work.” ~ Michael Ruse
The reproduction explanation is lazy, and problematic, for one thing, why should organisms evolve more complexity, this just gets in the way of reproduction? (bacteria seem to be doing just fine, so far as reproduction goes)
I don’t actually think they do, RoP, but I do think we have to be careful to read their words in context. I do not think that Dawkins thinks that living things look as though they were made by a designer – his whole book is about how living things do NOT look as though a designer was involved – but that their apparent designedness is due to the nature of evolutionary processes, which have the effect of optimising organisms to survive and breed in their environment.
The “reproduction argument”, far from being “lazy”, is absolutely key. At it’s most trivial, one of the most obvious distinction between an “artificial” plant (i.e. one designed and made by human designers) and a “real” plant is that the artificial one can’t reproduce.
The reason we an easily reject “evolution” as the explanation for black monoliths or stone henge is that they cannot reproduce. Sure we can see that they have some special quality that calls for explanation – but, as Dawkins rightly says (he’s an intelligent man, even though he says some stupid things) – and most universally applicable answer so far is that either the thing was designed by an evolved thing, or it evolved. If it can’t reproduce, it can’t have evolved, so it must have been produced by an evolved thing.
I myself would go further, and say that the things that appear to the kind of complexity of pattern we tend to call “designedness”, tend to be the result of non-linear process in which output is fed back as input. There are non-living systems that show enormous complexity – vortices, for instance, or crystals, as well as living systems and the products of living systems (our own artefacts). I propose that the common denominator is not a designing agent with a goal (although that may sometimes be the case) but non-linear processes. This includes the processes by which a designer designs (including the process by which the designer came into existince); the processes by which organisms (including designers) evolve; and the processes by which other non-living patterns are generated.
Elizabeth,
Lizzie, you really need to do some serious mental gymnastics to get around the plain meaning of their words there. Dawkins needs to burn his books if he has now changed his meaning, but Dawkins certainly argues in this book that things give the appearance of design, of course, he goes on for another 300 pages to explain why this is only an appearance because natural selection supposedly explains this without the need for real design. My point was a modest one, that no sane biologists denies the appearance of design, biology is filled with things that look designed.
Again, if reproduction was the point, then evolution has failed miserably, complex organisms reproduce at a very slow rate as compared to simple single celled organisms. I cannot see why evolution would bother adding complexity, which will just get in the way of reproduction.
Again, human engineers are working very hard on designing self-replicating machines, the fact that cells and organisms do this in no way shape or form imply that they are therefore not designed.
Suppose we traveled to a planet, and found robots, and discovered that they reproduced, now, would this mean it was more likely that they evolved via unguided natural processes?
Elizabeth,
//There are non-living systems that show enormous complexity – vortices, for instance, or crystals, as well as living systems and the products of living systems (our own artefacts).//
Lizzie, I cannot help but notice you are stuck in a Humean mode of thinking. Crystals do not look designed for the same reason biological machinery performing complex functions do. Crystals are actually not complex, they are highly ordered structures. But again, there is no mystery regarding their formation. You are bunching together order and information, order and information (or organization) are two very different things. Here is a fun fact, first pointed out by the polymath, in his classic paper, Polanyi argued that an informational macro molecule such as DNA is capable of storing digital information only because the base sequence is not effected by the forces of physics and chemistry at work within the DNA molecule. In short, DNA is a digital storage medium only because it can protect the base sequence from the effects of the very processes you believe are ultimately responsible for the forming it!
Very well. You’ve staked out a claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid_wasp
Is the Parasitoid wasp designed?
EL said:
No. I’m scoffing at the language in SETI’s statement, and at those who seem to think it represents a more scientific approach than ID.
I design software every day. Biology does not look designed. It looks evolved. It’s messy, concerns are cross cutting, there are no docstrings and so on. Software where changing one thing can change 1000 other things in unpredictable ways is not desirable. Yet that is how biology is.
And sure, biology “looks designed” in that it is obviously different from other artefacts we see in nature, but it was designed by something other then a being with conscious desire. No forethought. No planning. Just “whatever works”.
Where are the animals that use wheels ROP? Why has the designer not solved the movability problem with the most *obvious* answer of all? It’s clear why evolution cannot create wheeled structures, but please do explain why that is also the case from a design POV.
There are, of course, some examples of “wheels” in biology but nothing at the macro level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_systems
I didn’t even go there, I just responded to his “appearance of design” nonsense:
The first time religion of pieces said “define” he did it like this: *defines*. “…he *defines* biology…” Later he leaves out the scare asterisks. Whatever, it wasn’t my concern about whether Dawkins “defined” biology or not in that manner, which seems a mere quibble, but that he said something quite unsupportable. Which he did.
So I didn’t jump on religion of pieces over “defining” of “biology,” when the real problem I have is Dawkins’ statement and its treatment by the morons as if it were holy writ, “proof” that life appears designed. I don’t think that’s a good reason to pretend that I was “…swallowing the quotemined bait so uncritically.”
It wasn’t quotemined at all, it was partly misrepresented, but indeed, I do care more that Dawkins wrote the damn-fool nonsense more than that someone left off the “scare asterisks” at some point.
Glen Davidson
SETI is looking for something that has never been observed in astrophysics. Given many years of observations we know what signals we have received and determined causes for those. Some signals looked designed originally, and further work determined they were in fact not. Sounds like science to me.
What is ID looking for? ID claims that biology is designed, using biology as the evidence for that. Unlike SETI, ID has not performed further work on the “signals” it claims to have found.
If you want to draw parallels between ID and SETI then complete this sentence.
SETI is looking for narrowband signals because nature does not seem to be able to produce those.
ID is looking for _______ because nature does not seem to be able to produce those.
EL said:
EL, what do you think “apparent” means?
Still no citation for your universal claims, and still not the first reason I should care that some biologists have made that unsupportable, culturally-biased, claim.
Glen Davidson
OMagain said:
So? How does “never been observed in astrophysics” = “marker of intelligence”? Sounds like an ET of the gaps argument to me.
How does a signal “look designed” unless you know who the designer and the process by which the signal was generated?
ID is looking for (and found) semiotic systems, irreducibly complex systems, and highly complex, specified, functional systems, all of which, as SETI says, at least seems to be even in principle something nature is incapable of plausibly producing.
Like I wrote, it seems to be quibbling to worry about whether it’s a “definition” or not, especially when the elephant watching TV is that there is nothing objective about Dawkins’ “life appears designed” statements, even if it appears so to him.
But since you intend to stick with your misrepresentation, it’s at best “a definition, just a statement about life “appearing designed.” It’s not “Dawkins’ definition of biology,” which you wrote at one point, as if it were “the definition” Dawkins uses. A real definition, “Dawkins’ definition of biology,” should be something like “Biology is the study of life” and then something about the study of its origins, constitutions, and functions, etc.
Even if you’d said, “he once defined biology” thusly, good enough. If you pretend that it’s “Dawkins’ definition of biology,” that’s a misrepresentation.
Glen Davidson
No, it isn’t complex functions that make things “look designed,” or archaeologists wouldn’t be doing much at all.
Humans made very little that was complex in the past, precisely why crystals appear designed, in their relative simplicity. Indeed, crystals were long a mystery, were they due to “forms” or some such thing, or made by spirits in the earth?
To be fair, so does Dembski. But there was a mystery regarding crystals’ formation, and it is precisely their oderedness, their appearance of rationality, that make them appear rather more designed (apart from what we now know of their formation) than does life, with its lack of rationality and its reproduction.
There was long less doubt about (the basics of) life’s formation than about crystal formation, since life was generally observed to reproduce. The origin of life was a mystery, but that cleared up once reproduction, with its variations, was understood to result in adaptation and evolution.
Glen Davidson
Only if humans had not been observed making such signals.
They actually have been.
We know that we’re searching for fairly humanoid designers, since the only technological intelligences we have observed are humans. Looking for God’s handiwork won’t do, because we don’t even know if it has hands. And we do know the sorts of processes by which such signals are made, at least many of them.
Oh, right, ID is looking for the sorts of things that complex life almost certainly would utilize of necessity (and simple enough to have evolved). Actually, “looking for” is the wrong term, they’re basically taking real scientists’ work, making it sound as technological as possible, and redefining life’s essential information storage and use as “having been designed.” All the while it ignores the endless evolutionary and unintelligent shaping of these necessary systems in order to pretend that they “appear designed.”
The fact is that life and its systems appear evolved.
And, redefining life as “designed” isn’t a matter of discovery, it’s mere apologetics.
Glen Davidson
OMagain,
//Software where changing one thing can change 1000 other things in unpredictable ways is not desirable. Yet that is how biology is.//
This is not how biology is, the genetic code is fine tuned, in clever ways to minimize the negative effects of mutations.
The fact that you can break something does not show it evolved, or that it was easy to evolve. The argument from poor design is in essence actually a Darwin-of-the-gaps argument, and goes something like this, don’t understand the function of p, p is therefore without function, p is therefore “messy” or an example of “poor design”. The problem with these type of arguments is, not only that they are based on our ignorance for the most part, but that the science always comes back to bite the Darwinist in the ass. (junk DNA, the optimal design of the inverted retina are just some of the classic examples that comes to mind)
GD said:
You mean like humans have been observed making irreducibly complex machines, highly specified, functional machines, and semiotic systems?
We know that we’re searching for fairly humanoid designers, since the only technological intelligences we have observed are humans.
So, if a narrow band signal was detected, then if it came from a non-humanoid intelligence, it wouldn’t count? How would you know upon detecting the signal if the intelligence at the other end was humanoid or not? What you “know” is that you are searching for a narrow-band signal because,, as SETI states explicitly, it seems to be outside of the currently-known, plausible range of nature to produce. You can’t possibly “know” what the intelligence at the other end of the signal looks like.
ID doesn’t claim “god did it”. ID claims it is looking for a pattern that signifies the involvement of an intelligent entity of some sort.
Why would completely natural, complex life “almost certainly” use systems otherwise only known to be produced by human intelligence, and which appear to be implausible for anything else in nature to produce, even in principle?
GD said:
There is more than one characteristic that can make things appear to be designed.
You mean like humans have been observed creating life de novo?
No, they haven’t been, and your conflation of life and technology is neither inspired nor relevant to the details of non-poof evolved life.
How would we know? We don’t know if non-humanoid life (should it exist) makes such signals, do we? Anyhow, I’ve never thought that was the end, nor even that more complex signs wouldn’t be required to confirm humanoid life (language or other codes would likely do it–unless it was something evolved, like biologic DNA).
Way to miss the point. We don’t know about non-humanoids, we’re looking for what we do know, evolved intelligences. We have no idea if non-humanoid life would ever use our sorts of signals.
First off, intelligent beings are part of nature, so the ID-rhetoric is useless here. The point has never been even that a narrow-band signal is even outside of plausible astrophysics, it is merely that we’re not getting such signals from astrophysical phenomena and we do get it from human activity.
Like that’s relevant. We’re looking for evolved intelligence, because that’s all that we know. We don’t know of any sort of non-evolved intelligence that would make life, write hieroglyphics, or send out narrow-band signals.
It does in the churches. Oh, basically at the end of Meyer’s more recent tome of dreck, as well.
Since when has it been searching for anything but gaps?
In the first place, they’re only known to be reproduced by life, and appear to have evolved.
In the second place, how else would vast amounts of information be stored, except by some sort of code (analog wouldn’t be exact enough) on a substrate? Why, indeed, did Schroedinger come up with mostly the right criteria for the molecule of inheritance by considering the importance of both conservation and evolution? Crick read it, by the way.
Since humans didn’t invent DNA, there is nothing plausible about supposing that really-existing intelligence would have hit upon that solution. Or to have invented life in the first place, for that matter. I mean, why?
What’s implausible about anything else having produced it? Indeed, how is it that DNA in life is so very evolvable, when changing human informational products typically results in disaster?
Glen Davidson
Lizzie,
Sure they do, which is why nearly everyone (scientists included) was a creationist prior to Darwin.
The whole point of Dawkins’s book was to explain why that appearance, though compelling to the naive, is illusory.
hotshoe explains it well:
Oh? And ID has identified the designer has it?
A process has been identified that can plausibly produce such. That you can’t be bothered to learn about it is on you, no one else.
Actually, evolution was in vogue well before Darwin. Paley’s book was not well-viewed by biologists, as the problems for design aren’t exactly difficult to see (notably, why make quadrupedal apes and bipedal humans so similarly?). The chain-of-being seems to have been a kludgy attempt to make some sense of life, which somehow was functional without really seeming to be of much purpose.
I think that the Church (with a kind of sculptor-God) might have had a little to do with people being creationists in the past. Not so much in cultures with non-Abrahamic religions, which had metamorphoses of similar-looking organisms, sympathetic magic, and sometimes sexual activity, causing life’s forms.
It’s more naive than Dawkins’ lack of awareness knows.
Yeah, not really. Hotshoe needs to learn what a quotemine actually is.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
//Indeed, how is it that DNA in life is so very evolvable, when changing human informational products typically results in disaster?//
Haha, this is priceless. Considering that earlier, OMagain wrote: “Software where changing one thing can change 1000 other things in unpredictable ways is not desirable. Yet that is how biology is”
Heads I win, tails you lose. Can we stop pretending now that this was ever about evidence?
Change 1 bit in a software program and it’ll probably stop working. What happens when you have 1 mutation?
How many unique mutations do you think you personally have, right now? Any ideas.
Software !=biology.
Biology is much more fault tolerant then human created software.
Heads you lose, tails you lose.
And has it found it? If so, where?
What’s your point? I don’t know that I’d write what OMagan did, but it doesn’t change the fact that DNA can change and life goes on, while a minor bug in a typical program can make the whole thing quit working.
Oh, what did you win, the prize for biggest uncomprehending boob?
Yes, you can quit now, while the grown-ups can keep on with evidence-based science. You just sneer when evidence is brought up.
Glen Davidson