Over at Uncommon Descent, Jonathan McLatchie calls attention to an interview that Scottish Christian apologist David Robertson did with him. The 15-minute video is available there.
The issue is scientific evidence for intelligent design. As so often occurs, they very quickly ran off to the origin of life, and from there to the origin of the Universe. I was amused that from there they tried to answer the question of where God came from, by saying that it was unreasonable to push the origin issue quite that far back. There was also a lot of time spent being unhappy with the idea of a multiverse.
But for me the interesting bit was toward the beginning, where McLatchie argues that the evidence for ID is the observation of Specified Complexity, which he defines as complex patterns that conform to a prespecified pattern. He’s made that argument before, in a 2-minute-long video in a series on 1-minute apologetics. And I’ve complained about it before here. Perhaps he was just constrained by the time limit, and would have done a better job if he had more than 2 minutes.
Nope. It’s the same argument.
His Specified Complexity argument is William Dembski’s pre-2005 argument. It turned out that the argument required a conservation law to show that natural selection could not put this Specified Complexity into the genome. Dembski did have such an argument, but it turned out not to work (see my 2007 article for the details).
In 2005-2006 Dembski changed the argument, by redefining Specified Complexity to have an additional condition. Now you could only call a pattern Specified Complexity if it was not only complex and conformed to a prespecified pattern but also could not be brought about by natural evolutionary forces such as natural selection. A number of people here and at Panda’s Thumb pointed out that this fails to show us how this condition is to be evaluated. It makes SC something that comes in after one has somehow decided that an adaptation cannot have been achieved by natural selection. In short, it has been safeguarded against the criticism that evolution could bring about SC by defining the issue away. That makes SC a useless criterion.
But McLatchie has somehow missed all this history. He is back where Dembski was in the book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot be Purchased Without Intelligence, published in 2002. McLatchie has totally missed both the refutations of Dembski’s original criterion, and the 2005-2006 fix that rendered the SC criterion useless. In spite of having 15 whole minutes to clean up the mess, McLatchie and Robertson preferred to spend the extra time back at the origin of the Universe.
Perhaps you confuse what he understands with what is necessary to sell books.
I watched about 3 minutes of that video, then decided that I didn’t have the patience to listen all the way through.
He didn’t mention any book. However a number of websites were mentioned at the end, where he apparently comments. Basically I suppose he goes around making this non-working argument, plus talks a lot about the origin of the Universe and about the multiverse.
If you watched for that long, you probably saw everything he said about SC. The bit right after the 3-minute mark is him ducking the question of whether ID is associated with creationism. Then it’s off to the origin of the Universe etc.
Does any IDist from the least to the greatest? I doubt it.
I love Bill, am in debted to him, hate to be critical of my friend’s work,
but couldn’t he lay out something simple that a high schooler or kids can understand?
Here is an exercise for Kairos Turbo Encabulator, explain why one should think the following is designed using Dembski’s SC. Have any IDist try. I gave up.
I know, we need Joe Gallien who estimated the SC in cupcakes.
I have graduate back ground in communication and information theory, I’ve studied Shannon’s theorems and its consequences, I have a math degree, a physics degree, I studied quantum mechanics and general relativity, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.
If I can’t get Bill’s math to work, I doubt most IDists can either. Maybe someone smarter than me can pull it off, I gave up. I think other IDists should throw in the towel too, but they won’t say that publicly because it violates the unspoken code of not criticizing another IDist publicly.
stcordova,
If you cannot make the math work I assume that is because of the weakness of the process he was trying to model i.e. who can predict when natural selection will fix an adaption. If he succeed in making design testable the ID guys are still missing a mechanism. Whats fascinating is that his simple model #1 is an interesting concept but by trying to hit a home run (#2) vs a single he loses credibility.
I think Mike Behe does a very good job, by sticking to the inference argument thus keeping his message simple and credible.
One should never let being wrong stand in the way of an elegant theory.
petrushka,
Or even an inelegant one-like a theory that doesn’t need to explain how kidneys and fingers came about, because well, you wouldn’t be able to understand anyhow.
The evidence for a intelligent designer is indeed in the glorious complexity of the universe especially biology. so specific patterns being unable to be created by chance is a excellent direction.
Now a evolutionist can try and say that anything by small steps can be imagined to evole from point A-B. However impossible by any sense of credibility, as long as obeying physics etc,.
So a biological pattern that just couldn’t be made to corperate with other patterns to bring along a needed innovation is a great point.
It must be there in the intimacy of genes etc.
There be thousands of examales.
Plants communicate with other plants. That happened through a series of accidental mutations that happened to be beneficial?
Yea right.
Not sure whether you are asserting or mocking the idea of chemical signalling in plants, or simply scoffing that such a system could have evolved.
colewd,
Who can predict when a ball will land on a given number in a biased roulette wheel?
Whoever produced the video was honest enough to highlight the handwaving.
And he’s missed the replacement of specified complexity with active information in the Law of Conservation of Information.
And he’s missed the rebranding of specified complexity as a measure of meaningful information.
Congratulations, you are on the first step towards true knowledge. You have asked a question!
Unfortunately you have failed on the second step towards true knowledge.
Because it really matters.
The real point, of course, is that evolution didn’t happen. “Why” barely matters at all, evidence even less.
Glen Davidson
I continue to disagree with many here: I argue that specified information (Leslie Orgel’s original concept) is a reasonable measure of meaningful information. It was also put forward by Jack Szostakj and called “functional information” (and by me in 1978 and called “adaptive information”).
That part, Dembski got right.
What you can infer from that–not as much.
Glen Davidson
He had a reasonable measure of information, but could not show that it was impossible to get the information by natural selection.
Alan Fox,
Its scientific evidence for intelligent design, if a system in nature exists that is far too complicated for accidental mutations (what in tandem with other plants?) to account for.
Those far too complicated systems abound in nature. You all just plugs your eyes and ears to that reality.
Not at all. You are invoking the “Sherlock Holmes” argument. Your claim that evolutionary theory fails to account for some observation therefore we should default to “Intelligent Design” as an explanation fails on two counts.
First, you have not made clear how or whether you think plants communicate, in the normal sense of the word, so I’m unclear what evolutionary explanation is required or is failing.
Second, “Intelligent Design” is not an explanation for anything. There is no “Intelligent Design” theory that has any explanatory or predictive power.
I’m well aware that evolutionary theory is not a complete theory of everything to to with life as we find it. But we continue to understand today better than we did yesterday. Whereas “Intelligent Design” continues its decline as a failed political strategy.
How complex does something have to be before random mutations can no longer account for it? Are there systems in nature that random mutations can account for? Can you name one if so?
The argument from bald assertion. Also known as begging the question.
What’s it like to commit the most basic of all the logical fallacies?
Shannon information is generally not viewed as a measure of meaningful information. Dembski explicitly said in one of his books CSI is not a measure of meaningful (semantic) information. He goes into this in NFL book and describes information theory in terms of statistics, mereology, syntactics, and semantics.
Information measures are tricky because it presumes that the engineers building the senders, the communication channels, and receivers — that they all tally the physical structures information content the same way.
When it comes to biology, unless we talk to the Designer (likely God), we won’t know what his convention is for measuring bits for us to be able to adopt the “right” information measure.
If I asked an communication and information engineer how much information is in a JPEG file, he’ll probably say, “it depends on your perspective.” Information measures are perspective dependent.
[This is related to the declaring which microstates to measure (gasp) entropy (which is uncertainty, and measure of uncertainty being a measure of information). When someone transmits 10 bits of information, he reduces 10 bits of uncertainty on the channel.]
Entropy measures (aka information measures) are also perspective dependent as I show here:
I also connected Clausius, Boltzmann, Dembski and Shannon somewhere in that thread, but here is one of my derivations demonstrating the equivalence:
http://creationevolutionuniversity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=72
If anyone has objections, speak up. But I note Gordon Davisson agreed with my derivation here:
And I got tossed from UD shortly because it basically showed Barry Arrington had no clue what he was talking about when I and Gordon criticized Arrington’s use of the 2nd law to argue ID, and basically just about most of the IDists at UD including Kairos Turbo Encabulator had not clue.
Bottom line, I urge IDist to drop CSI and 2nd law arguments for ID, even if right (which is questionable for the 2nd law arguments), they aren’t worth the trouble.
Jonathan McLatchie still doesn’t understand Dembski’s argument
How about 99.99% of creationists and IDists.
Alan Fox,
No I don’t think so Alan.
If random mutations can’t account for all the complex information needed for all of this intricate systems of life, then intelligent design is the ONLY fall back. It is either random or planned. There are no other options.
Saying that ID has failed as a theory is just plain silly. In what way has it failed?
In fact just the opposite Alan, and you should know it. More and more scientists everyday are coming to the conclusion that the Darwinian theory can not account for life on Earth. Shapiro, Margulis, Behe, Michio Kaku, Conway Morris, are just a few of the thousands of names of scientists who have come to the conclusion that Darwinian theory isn’t it. The list is growing everyday. The dissent from Darwin list is just the ones who are willing to admit it publicly. Which is pretty amazing considering the danger to ones career for going against the academia nazis.
You are getting left behind in your old school education.
phoodoo,
Stunning ignorance, Phoodoo: http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2007/10/rm-ns-creationist-and-id-strawman.html?m=1
Shapiro, Margulis, and Morris aren’t design theorists. Nor are Pigliucci, Kirschner and Gerhard, Jablonka, Oding-Smee, or any other contributors to the extended evolutionary synthesis.
The rigid dichotomy between orthodox neo-Darwinian gradualism vs intelligent design, however useful for culture war propaganda, has nothing to do with what’s actually going on among practicing biologists.
Richardthughes,
Stunning use of cut and paste Richard. How did you find the buttons?
phoodoo,
Apparently I can find things whilst you just stay ignorant, Phoodoo.
How about a process with random mutations combined with the feedback of differential selection and which carries forward heritable traits?
Can that sort of process produce complex information? If not, why not?
You are, as usual, missing the point. What phoodoo SAYS is that life is too complicated for evolution to have produced it, therefore his god. What he MEANS is, his god, therefore alternative explanations must be rejected a priori on some arbitrary grounds.
I think of this as “god in a kaleidoscope”, since clearly natural processes couldn’t possibly have produced such complex patterns. Which is a simple illustration of how the conclusions came first, the rationalization second.
Evolution is more than just random mutations. It is also natural selection and genetic drift.
So where is your demonstration that this process cannot account for extant biodiversity? You have baldly asserted it now several times, yet there is no support given for the claim. So why can’t extant evolutionary theory not account for the diversity and complexity of life?
There is non-random un-planned (aka deterministic). Things you throw up come down, that’s not random, it isn’t planned either.
You don’t think that there is no theory of “Intelligent Design”?
Random mutation is an essential element of the theory of evolution as is the equally essential element, non-random selection. It is certainly the only plausible scientific theory that attempts to account for the observed pattern of common descent.
Wrong twice again. “Intelligent Design” is not a theory of anything, it is merely a catchy slogan. And the fall-back from not having an explanation for a particular observation is that we don’t yet have an explanation. “I don’t know (so let’s see if we can find out)” is an infinitely more acceptable approach compared to “I don’t believe evolutionary explanations so I’ll make something up”.
It fails twice. Firstly in not being a scientific theory. And secondly in failing to hoodwink the US legal system into accepting that ID has an alternative explanation for the observed facts of common descent.
All you need to do is point me to the scientific theory that is “Intelligent Design”. Surely you can do this if such a theory exists.
That is undoubtedly true. Fortunately other contributors to this site help out enormously with my deficiencies.
@ All who contribute thoughtful posts and comments
I really appreciate your spending time sharing knowledge and insights.
No one is a “design theorist”. There is no scientific theory of Intelligent Design.
If there was then phoodoo would not be pretending so very hard that these questions have not been asked.
! phoodoo, it’s your idea that things that are too complex to have evolved were designed. Yet you seem reluctant to flesh out the claim by answering some very basic questions.
Alan Fox,
Do you include HGT as part of random mutation? I agree with you here that universal common decent requires RMNS or some other mechanistic hypothesis to be credible.
I agree with Joe Felsenstein that the ID group has not proven the negative i.e. RMNS cannot add biological information. Both Joe and Allan Miller have shown that with simple systems it can add information.
Where I am skeptical is if it can add information with complex systems like the formation of a protein complex where all parts need to fit together or long protein sequences that don’t have a homology.
I agree that there are politics around the ID movement as with the evolutionist movement (groups like the NCSE). If we strip that away we have two competing inferences the design inference and universal common decent.
In my mind, both are problematic. UCD is very difficult to reconcile with most transitions or divergences mathematically because the genome is a sequence and changing it randomly will most likely move it toward non function with natural selection unable to guide it because or the almost infinite mathematical space and a lack of a sequential target.
Design is what I am observing when I look at at incredible micro machines that can be built repeatably with a sequence like the spliceosome or a ribosome or the fact that DNA, proteins and alternative splicing are organized as an efficient mathematical sequence, yet once I make this observation I don’t know what to do next.
I am not sure what the answer is.
colewd,
You could start by addressing this instead of avoiding it:
Both are problematic (really, what would one expect of a historical science like evolution?), except where testing matters, such that one has all of the patterns expected of common descent with modification as predicted, and the other has none of the patterns of design (or design evolution, if one wants to go there) that it should predict. One really should go with the evidence.
Why are a few humans born with tails, and why do we have a coccyx made of many fused vertebrae? With evolution there’s a simple explanation, with ID there’s a lot of blather, noting that there is function (not well served by fusing tiny vertebrae together) which wasn’t the point, and really no explanation at all for designing it as if it were the vestige of a tail. Fusing the bones of bird wings out of what were articulated bones in dinosaur forelimbs is another obvious “make-do” of evolution, and not at all what one would wish to design in order to make good strong wings with the least resources.
There is much that is inexplicable sans blind evolution, while design can never explain the slavishly derivative patterns discovered in life. ID is problematic, not because it raises difficult questions, but because it answers none of the oddities of life (vis-a-vis design, anyhow) and raises no difficult questions about design at all. That’s because it has no mechanism of design, but merely assumes that some intelligence could do anything and everything that we see. Yet the evidence for this intelligence is not only missing, the evidence is against the sort of rational intelligence of which even humans are capable–and we could not design life de novo at this time.
Glen Davidson
Except if you include natural selection. You still don’t seem to get that WITH natural selection, the genome WON’T move towards non-function. What is the issue, why do you think natural selection can’t do that?
GlenDavidson,
I agree with your point on design but don’t on UCD. Start with the first mission critical transition the first eukaryotic cell from an ancestor. How would you predict the genome to reorganize itself to build the to nuclear pore complex, the spliceosome and chromosome structures and to organize themselves by RMNS as a mechanism. Although design is a dead end observation at this point it is far better than RMNS at explaining this transition.
If evolution changed universal common decent to universally shared biochemical mechanisms I would agree with the theory based on the evidence.
colewd,
Just seen this but too late for detailed reply. Yes to HGT (and symbiogenesis). I’ll try and find time tomorrow.
In what sense does it ‘explain’ that transition?
You don’t need to predict things that have already happened!
But to untangle your garble there, you could say that all of those things you describe had intermediaries. The same cannot be said of design as it does not need nor require intermediaries. So if we find those, that’s evidence against ID, right?
So the question you really need to be asking as an intelligent design supporter is why was there any need for a transition at all?
As has been pointed out many times, your purported designer went to extreme lengths to make it seem as if evolution did it. Why bother at all with any prior form? Any idea?
OMagain,
I have not proposed any designer. The design inference is evidence of design and thats why I think it is a limited argument.
As the biochemical evidence rolls in, it is becoming less evident that evolution did it. If you define evolution in terms of UCD and natural selection.
colewd,
Strange you don’t find many actual biologists or biochemists coming to this conclusion.
Which nobody but the inhabitants of Creationist imaginations does. This has probably been pointed out to you already, as a frequent commenter at Sandwalk.
colewd,
That would be a dumb movre on evolution’s part. Shared sequence is a clear indicator of common descent. It is accepted as such in a court of law – eg forensics and paternity. Why would one accept sequence similarity as common descent within a species, but say the exact same pattern represents ‘common design’ outside it?
Are you a species immutablist? If not, you have a problem. Or you should have. Because you are allowing the sequence-is-descent conclusion to ‘leak out’ from the species boundary. Where do you stop?
Kantian Naturalist,
The modern synthesis is not a theory. All it is saying is that Darwinian style evolution is not enough to explain life. It gives no explanation as to what is enough, and what it is limited to in including. Its simply an admission by academics that Neo-Darwinianism isn’t what we are finding.
Thus Shapiro, and Margulis, and the others are indeed ID’sts in one stripe or another, simply because if not Darwin, then it is by design. That Shapiro and others don’t want to openly admit this is not surprising at all, since he works at a major university where he would probably lose his job if he did.
I am not buying into this crap that one can say, oh well life just makes itself happen, that doesn’t mean there is a designer. That is a pathetic philosophy that deserves no attention. “It just happens, because that is what nature does, it organizes itself into life…” That’s just stupidity by people who aren’t willing to accept the implications.
It just is, is not a philosophical stance for anything but a bird or a sponge. Its worse than ignorance.
Except for all that ones that do of course.
Allan Miller,
I agree with this. At what point does sequence divergence lower the probability of common decent?
colewd,
The elephant is still in the room. You can hear the floor creak as she shifts her weight from one leg to the other.
Why not be polite and stop ignoring her?