I recently bumped a post by keiths: Things That IDers Don’t Understand, Part 1 — Intelligent Design is not compatible with the evidence for common descent as it had come up in a recent discussion. Vjtorley has responded on UD with a post called Is Darwinism a better explanation of life than Intelligent Design?
I’ve unbumped keiths’ post, as the thread was getting rather long, and in any case, it would be good to respond to vjtorley, who is, of course, very welcome to come over here in purpose. I like Dr Torley, and do hope he will drop by, but in any case, the loudhailer seems to work reasonably well!
Feel free to continue the discussion that had been renewed on keiths’ post in this one (or on the old one if you like, using the link).
I see Vincent Torley has noticed Keith’s post.
The title: “Is Darwinism a better explanation of life than Intelligent Design?” This immediately raises the question, “what is the ID explanation for life?” and also contains the implied misconception that Darwinian evolution is an explanation for the origin of life, rather than its diversity.
What follows does not offer any expansion on an ID explanation for life or any comparison of competing theories. But wait! Hopes are raised!
But we then just have a restatement of the usual argument from incredulity.
Darwinism is a poor, incomplete, inadequate group of theories that attempt to explain life’s diversity. But what does ID tell us, apart from that?
I also like Dr Torley – but do wish he would be more concise. I just don’t have time to read a 10,000 word response. Can anyone point me to the essence of his argument?
Hi Mark
Had commented on Vincent Torley’s post on the previous thread but as Lizzie has opened this, I’ve moved it here. I too find Torley unnecessarily verbose but there appears not to be an argument for ID in there.
Dr. Torley argues that that all currently known examples of the kind of specified, functional complexity found in proteins, cells, etc. require ID as part of a sufficient explanation, AND that unintelligent forces and material interactions are, to date, scientifically implausible as explanations.
That is not an argument from incredulity; it is an argument that makes the case that one hypothesis, even in theory, is implausibly inadequate; and the other hypothesis – in theory – is sufficient to accomplish the task – of generating the kinds of complex, hierarchical, specified, functional systems we find in biology.
Well, when they actually do come up with a hypothesis, then we can compare it with mainstream hypotheses.. Until then “scientifically implausible” means “personal incredulity”.
William J. Murray,
Reification, William. Saying unintelligent forces are “scientifically implausible” is exactly what I mean by an argument from incredulity. And “require ID” is a meaningless phrase. Unless you want to tell me what ID does, – where, when, how. No need for an exhaustive explanation. Just an initial hypothesis or even a hint will do.
Unless you are going to flesh out some alternative hypothesis, then you are merely aping Dr Torley’s argument from incredulity.
Not if one shows how it is scientifically implausible. There’s a difference between subjectively finding something to be “incredible”, or non-credible, and showing through science, like the work of Douglas Axe, that an explanation is scientifically non-credible. That’s not an argument from incredulity; that’s making a scientific case that a competing hypothesis is not up to the explanation required.
Well, I certainly cannot argue against willful ignorance (given the amount of freely available information that provide the meaning of that phrase) or obstructionist denial.
No, it doesn’t. One doesn’t even require a competing hypothesis to demonstrate the current hypothesis implausible as an explanation.
If, in your mind, “scientifically implausible” = “personal incredulity”, then you don’t understand what “argument from incredulity” means.
And, ID proponents have a competing hypothesis; intelligent design.
Has Dr Torley studied proteins for long? Has he thoroughly reviewed the relevant literature? Does he appreciate the degree to which protein structure may be varied without loss of function? Has he read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested recent publications about the exploration of “protein space”, such as that linked to in a previous thread at TSZ?
Has he beseeched himself, in the bowels of Christ, to think it possible he may be mistaken?
I fear not. Personal incredulity is indeed the most likely diagnosis. Perhaps Dr. Torley should appoint and unleash a Champion such as Douglas Axe. Indeed, if Axe was to come here there could be a fascinating discussion!
Reification again, William! Where is this competing hypothesis? What does it predict?
There is a difference between asserting something is implausible and demonstrating that it is implausible. Behe claimed that the evolution of the various bacterial flagella was impossible due to something he calls “irreducible complexity”. To date there has been no demonstration of Behe’s claim; rather the reverse.
Dr. Torley refers to the work of Douglas Axe, and made a more detailed case about proteins here:
Alan Fox,
If Behe used the term “impossible”, I’m sure he meant “scientifically implausible to the point of being not worth considering”.
When your link finally gets to the point that Behe was actually making: (page 6):
The whole point of “irreducible complexity” is not that none of the components could have come from somewhere else, but rather that the function of the thing in question depends upon the integrated, complex, necessary nature of the components all being assembled properly and working. Take one component out, or replace it with a component that doesn’t fit or isn’t shaped right, and the function is lost (along with its select-ability).
Your source attempts to solve this issue:
Do Pallen and Matzke provide a scientific example of this “exaption”, or is “exaption” part of a “just so” story that is convenient to Darwinistic ideology?
So they have used one “just so” story – that feathers “might have” been “exapted” from one function in the use of another, different function – to support another “just so” story – that all of the proper-fitting, properly shaped parts just so happened to be in the same place, at the same time, and with all of the operational, regulatory and error-protection infrastructure necessary to start functioning as a motility device that could then be selected for on the basis of motility conferring an advantage.
This article:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/03/michael_behe_hasnt_been_refute044801.html
… presents a rebuttal to your paper – it even refers to it.
The “rebuttal” to Behe’s “irreducible complexity” amounts to no more than a “just so” story about how unintelligent processes could have taken various parts out of various entirely different machines that happened to fit and work with each other, and happened to produce some selectable evolutionary advantage, and over time accumulated (with all steps checked for selective advantage) enough properly-fitting, properly-shaped parts, appropriately configured control, error-check and operational support systems so that when the last such piece fell into place, holy crap, we have this:
Impossible? No. Scientifically implausible to the point of absurdity? Yes.
.
What is it that Dr Axe has shown to be impossible through science? Are you referring to this or something else?
William, I don’t say that an argument from incredulity is wrong per se, if supporting evidence is cited. I am just saying ID arguments never go beyond questioning evolutionary theory. There is no alternative theory of ID that purports to explain life’s diversity.
You could try telling me where intelligent design theories are to be found.
Thanks, William – I’m not an assiduous reader of UD, and had missed that.
However, I think that the paper on which VJT uncritically relies has been adequately answered by the paper linked to in the “Protein Space” discussion here at TSZ; and there are other papers going some way to debunking the Very Large Numbers strawman beloved of creationist/ID demagogues
Alas for you, nobody’s come up with scientific investigation that shows mainstream views are scientifically non-credible. There’s psuedoscience aplenty, of course. And Axe’s work, while not psuedoscience, does not demonstrate what you imply it does.
Yes, that’s true. But you do need scientific investigation that demonstrated that the current hypothesis is implausible. Which ID proponents do not have.
When they come up with a scientific hypothesis, we’ll be happy to investigate it. ’An unknown intelligent designer did something, somewhere, somehow, for no apparent reason’ is not a model.
Nope, you’re wrong. It doesn’t present a rebuttal.
Science is only rebutted by more science. Peer-reviewed scientific journal articles only, not unqualified blogger’s web articles.
Funny how there is never any research conducted by IDists. What are they doing with all that money they raise? What are they actually doing with all those well-publicized college degrees besides using them to bolster their spurious claim of “scientific credibility” at christian sites?
Where’s even one research paper showing any specific stretch of DNA in a bacteria has no evolutionary antecedents, and thus could (at least hypothetically) have required some intervention (by a designer) to explain its arising in the genome?
Funny, not one.
IDists need to get off their collective asses and do some science if they expect to rebut science.
Nobody claimed that Axe has shown anything to be “impossible”, but rather his work, and that of others, have shown (as far as current evidence indicates) that the generation of a single functional protein of average length is scientifically implausible given the known computational resources available.
Of course they do. They find an existing agency that is up to the task of locating and using functional sequences from improbably large search spaces of non-function – human ID, which means that the commodity humans have (termed ID) is regularly and even trivially employed to find highly improbably function in vast oceans of non-function that could not plausibly be found without the human ID agency.
Unless, of course, you think battleships can be built without intelligent agency involved.
Of course there is; all of the currently known processess and mechanisms currently known to contribute to evolution, but instead of being left to unintelligent devices, rather employed by an intelligent (deliberate) agency toward developing various ends.
IOW, ID is the same as current evolutionary theory, except with the addition of intelligent agency where it is required (by comparison to what humans can produce in terms of acquiring functional targets in large search spaces of non-function, and by eliminating as scientfically implausible all known non-intelligent processes).
The isolated island metaphor keeps coming back.
OK. So whenever we have a gap in our knowledge on a particular evolutionary event, we assume the addition of “intelligent agency”. Could you give me an idea of how this would apply? Let’s take the various bacterial flagella. Would the “agency” only need to act on a single bacterial genome at the moment it was being copied into two daughter cells, like guided mutation? Or is something more interventionist involved?
I haven’t read Axe’s work, but the evaluations I’ve seen of it say that Axe is a capable researcher, who posits processes no evolutionary biologist ever suggested might be possible, and competently demonstrates that, yes indeed, they’re not possible!
The general approach is “evolution claims pigs fly. Here is genuine competent laboratory science proof that pigs can’t fly. Therefore evolution is wrong.” But it’s never quite clear whether Axe KNOWS he’s disproving claims nobody made, or whether his religious views prohibit him from properly understanding what evolutionary biologists ARE claiming. Maybe he really is demolishing the best understandings of evolution his orientation allows him to see.
This seems to be a fairly standard “cart-before-horse” ID proponent response, but it doesn’t really solve the issue. The problem (that this doesn’t address) is that ID did not predict battleships. In fact, ID doesn’t predict anything. Hence your further claim that “ID is the same as current evolutionary theory, except with the addition of intelligent agency where it is required” doesn’t work because so far there’s no positive scientific study demonstrating a need for said intelligent agency. Blog posts by Axe or Luskin are not scientific studies or published results, nor are non-fiction books for the general populace.
Thus far, no utility has been demonstrated by attaching “ID” to any scientific concept. Until such is done, ID won’t be considered an alternative in science. It might be an alternative metaphysics, philosophy, or religious framework, and that would be fine if proponents wish to hold to that. But it isn’t science at this point.
Oh, and your claim above strikes me as a little off. I’ve yet to see any “pro-ID” published paper that “find(s) an existing agency up to the task of locating and and using the functional sequences from improbably large search spaces of non-function.” Can you link to one?
To be fair, argument from incredulity is perfectly valid. I find the Genesis story to be frankly incredible, although it can be made perfectly compatible with the evidence if we allow that God made things appear to have been made differently from the way he told the writers of Genesis that he made them.
I just don’t believe it. As William would say, I choose not to believe it, because I find it much more comfortable to make the assumption that things make sense.
They may not.
As I understand from an earlier post of William’s, he doesn’t think that we would observe anything non-natural about an ID intervention, any more than we’d expect to see neurons disobeying the laws of nature in a thinking brain.
Here’s an ID theory that any IDist who likes it is welcome to:
Let’s say that a Designer (and I’m going to assume a divine designer, because, as Dembski says, any material designer just moves the problem back a notch, as it would itself require a designer) wanted to create a universe in which life would appear. This designer knows that of the trillions of possible universes, only one will unfold according to the Divine Plan and bring forth life and human beings, and yet such beings are her Divine Purpose.
And so she causes to exist just that one in a trillion universe, in which each event unfolds as she intends. From within the universe, all we observe are natural causes, which, nonetheless, against all apparent odds, happen to result in us. And so the only way of inferring the Designer is to apprehend just how many possible universes might have been created, and how few of those would have resulted in us.
Nothing has occurred that is not possible given the rules we infer about this universe. But the probability that of all possible events, the ones that lead to intelligent life are those that occurred is infinitessimal, unless we posit that we were intended – that of all hypothetical universes in the Divine Mind, the one she chose to actuate was the one that would lead to us.
We will find nothing but apparently fortuitous chemistry in the formation of novel proteins – but such unlikely chemistry that trillions of alternative chemical reactions must have been considered and rejected as being not on the path to us.
There. I think I’ve presented myself with a more convincing ID argument than any I’ve read so far 🙂
I think that’s a fair argument for ID as far as it goes, but it still suffers from the same scientific issue I see all such arguments for ID suffering from: it isn’t a scientific theory because it doesn’t rely upon a body of evidence or provide any predictive power as part of it’s explanation. It might be an hypothesis, but then how would you test it and, more importantly, control for it?
Heh; that sounds like a gussied-up version of mulitverses made palatable for ID/creationists by injecting a deity that looked at all the possible universes that could have condensed matter and living organisms but chose the one that produced us in particular. We already know they hate it. 🙂
William,
What biological process is generating this protein you talk of?
Sure, if you attempt to pick a specific protein out of protein space then the chances of getting the specific one you are after are very small indeed. Yet nobody is making the claim that is how it happens.
So, please relate this statement of yours to actual biology rather then a lottery where there is a single winner and many losers. That’s not biology.
If you can’t explain what biological process it is that is iterating through protein space attempting to “find” a specific protein please withdraw your claim as irrelevant to biology.
The Front Loading argument made by many ID proponents is – in practical terms (material reailty) – indistinguishable from “Darwinian” evolution. Intention, the key difference between the two, can not be scientifically measured nor detected.
I know it’s been said before, and will need to be said again.
Well, it would be very difficult to test. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true, and it’s suggested by evidence that there are so many other things that might have happened and didn’t, and which don’t have intelligent life at the end. It makes the negative prediction that we won’t find evidence that lots of other alternative universes did happen.
And it would possibly explain why some specific events are very hard to replicate – abiogenesis, for instance, the ribosome. Sure they could happen, but if ours is the only one of a near-infinite number of universes in which the precise concatenation of circs that led to life/ribosomes didn’t happen, but might have done, then we aren’t going to see it happen in a lab.
So the evidence is negative. It’s still evidence.
It’s the divine twin of the evil multiverse – it says there are no actuated multiverses therefore ours was selected on purpose as the One True Universe. That’s why ID ists are so anti-multiverse -they think it is a lame, unevidenced cover story to account for the unlikelihood of hitting what looks like a fluke in a single shot.
I disagree. I think the Front-loading hypothesis is potentially the one testable hypothesis to be derived from ID – it makes different predictions from Darwinian evolution, or could do.
There’s fine tuning, which is indistinguishable from evolution, and there’s front loading, which sounds a bit like Chardin.
Either way, they wish to avoid contingency and the possibility that evolution might not have led to humans.
There is no material difference between a random mutation occurring at moment t and God choosing an intended mutation to occur at moment t, “programmed” to activate via the precise configuration of the universe at its birth.
Ok. Again, fair enough as it goes. I think it’s weak to rely on negative predictions and evidence since establishing a negative is nie unto impossible, but I’ll concede it works as a hypothesis.
Due to the fact that ID proponents have no regular framework for their ideas and because they have no peer review, they allow some remarkable statements to slide by without challenge.
For example, Kariosfocus recently stated that the platypus demonstrates the existence of object oriented code in genomes. I have to assume he meant that the various bits of the platypus that look birdlike are reflections of code objects shared by birds.
This is the kind of question that common descent handles rather well and which theories of barimonology leave in a muddle.
Right. But this is where CSI would actually come in useful. If the postulated intended mutation were one of the tiny proportion that would lead to people, and consistently, over time, what happened to happen were the tiny proportion of mutations that would lead to people, one might start to say that the sequence had specified complexity.
The biggest problem with CSI isn’t that the idea is invalid but that you can’t actually calculate it.
If god is omniscient, she would have concurrent full knowledge of all possible universe and all possible histories, which to my simple mind is equivalent to them existing.
He did?
What a breakthrough!
When does KF expect the Nobel nomination?
vjtorley’s getting a lot of flack for buying into common descent at all. He’s been taken to task for citing whales, which are, of course, excellent evidence for common descent.
I hope he won’t get distracted by that! Dr Torley, if you are reading this, do drop by 🙂
But what Darwinian evolution/ID produces is a planet full of a great diversity of life. Thus the rise of Human beings via mutations intended or random can only be calculated as a whole in regards to everything else alive. And if CSI is problematic to calculate for just one mechanism and virtually impossible for a single lineage (humanity), then I can’t even describe the challenges of calculating the CSI of an interdependent, 4 billion year old planet-wide ecology except to say that CSI is useless (in this regard) even if it were calculable for a given mechanism.
The problem is that there’s no reason to assume the designer would put in a direct path of only tiny mutations that lead to people. In other words, there is nothing in the Front Loading concept preventing the designer from sticking in code that causes regressions or loss of function at given points just because…well…who knows? I just don’t think there’s actually a way to falsify front loading against evolution given what you’ve provided above without really knowing something (a LOT of something) about the designer.
petrushka,
And again, the “body plans” that Stephen Meyer finds impossible to explain without an Intelligent designer are the, “at least nineteen, and as many as thirty-five (of forty total), phyla” that made their first appearance during the Cambrian explosion.” (see The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang) However the UD crowd and the laymen ID supporter in general understand “body plan” to refer the different morphologies within the phylum chordate even though by Meyer’s use of the term all chordates share but one.
Given that “built-in responses to environmental cues” is an oft-made claim by ID supporters I’m surprised they’ve not performed a similar experiment to Lenski’s but designed to show that these “built in responses” actually exist.
That meshes well with what I came up with (not uniquely or even originally, I’m sure) when thinking about how to address the problem of evil rationally.
If we assume arguendo that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity exists, the only explanation for the evil we see is that we are but one of many possible universes being considered by said deity. Since, contra Pollyanna, we are demonstrably not in the best of all possible worlds, this will not be the reality immanentized. We will last only until we are forgotten.
Patrick,
Well, that’s consoling, in a way.
edit -quote
None. We’re talking about putting 250 functioning, fitted, interdependent proteins together from scratch to create a simple self-replicating organism. To do that, you don’t have biology yet. You don’t have natural selection yet. All you have are chemicals that happen to be interacting in whatever environment they happen to be in.
Lizzie,
But that to me, appears to be trying to make sense of the senseless. An intelligent designer who could do all that could also do more. He/she/it could simply go to the end product. Why would he/she/it take one shortcut but not take others?
William,
Where are you getting your information about the origin of life and the first self-replicator from?
On what basis are you making this claim of 250 proteins? That the simplest cell so far observed has that number? That’s a strong claim, that the first replicator exactly resembles that cell.
On what basis have you determined that the first proteins involved in life are impossible without design?
While that may or may not be the case (it’s not) that says nothing about the origin of life. Until you know exactly what was involved in the first replicator I fail to see how you can make claims that relate to it.
And, please note, even after the advent of natural selection it’s the IDers claim that proteins are still impossible to generate naturally and therefore my point asking you to relate that generation to biology still stands.